Six Without Hope

There was gloom along the dingy staircase leading up over the grocery, and gloom in the drab corridor outside the apartment. But the Philadelphia reporter who climbed the stairs last week to pay a call on William Baird and his family found no gloom inside. Mrs. Baird had put some pork on for dinner. Her sons stood cheerful guard on the preparations as she called out, "Better watch that stuff or it'll burn up." One son, Robert, 20, could not walk, but he was as cheerful as the rest.

As the dinner arrangements went forward, there was no sign that Robert and all five of his brothers are doomed to die from muscular dystrophy, a progressive wasting away of muscle tissues which will make them more helpless each year until their weakened condition leads to death (probably from pneumonia).

William Baird, a $50-a-week roofer's helper, and his wife Mary first became aware of the fate awaiting their family eleven years ago when Robert began to have trouble walking. Doctors warned then that his disease might turn up in the other boys. They offered no hope of prevention or cure. Nobody knows what causes muscular dystrophy. Doctors know only that it often appears among several male members of the same family and is probably the result of a recessive gene which suddenly flares into prominence. It produces almost no symptoms beyond deterioration of the muscles. But once its course is started, it is relentless.

There are 200,000 known cases of muscular dystrophy in the U.S., according to the Bairds' doctor, Dystrophy Specialist Gerald E. Pratt, and probably many more unrecognized sufferers.

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