Henry T. Lynch

Henry Thompson Lynch (January 4, 1928 – June 2, 2019) was an American physician noted for his discovery of familial susceptibility to certain kinds of cancer and his research into genetic links to cancer.

He is sometimes described as "the father of hereditary cancer detection and prevention" or the "father of cancer genetics", although Lynch himself said that title should go to the early 20th century pathologist Aldred Scott Warthin.

Lynch was the chairman of preventive medicine at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska and held the Charles F. and Mary C. Heider Endowed Chair in Cancer Research.

Early life and education

Lynch was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and grew up in New York City. He dropped out of high school at 14 and joined the U. S. Navy at age 16, using false identification to disguise his age.

Career

Lynch served as an assistant professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, then joined the faculty at Creighton University in 1967. Noting that some cancer patients had relatives and ancestors with the same type of cancer, Lynch postulated that cancer could be hereditary. He began to focus his research on that possibility, although it was considered unlikely by the medical establishment of the time, which was focused on environmental causes of cancer; in fact the American Cancer Society frequently stated that cancer was not hereditary.

In 1970, he applied for a research grant from the National Institutes of Health, citing a family in which numerous members had colon cancer, but the grant application was rejected, as were most of his other grant applications over the following 20 years. He persisted, compiling data and statistics that demonstrated patterns of "cancer syndromes" through multiple generations of families.

He defined the necessary criteria for a genetic cancer: early age of onset of the disease, specific pattern of multiple primary cancers, and Mendelian patterns of inheritance in hundreds of extended families worldwide. The Registry allows the Network to educate individual patients about their genetic risk status. Lynch died of congestive heart failure on June 2, 2019, at the age of 91.