"I finally came to believe it was simply an unusual family," says pediatrician-geneticist Herbert A. Lubs, MD, "since a number of other investigators tried to find the defect and couldn't and even I failed to find it in other families."
Indeed, for a seemingly almost trivial reason, Lubs had to wait eight years for confirmation of his 1969 finding of a "fragile X chromosome" or "marker X chromosome" in four mentally retarded men who spanned three generations of the same family (Am J Hum Genet 21:231-244, 1969).
It was not until 1977 that the next report of familial mental retardation apparently due to the X chromosome abnormality, by J. Harvey, C. Judge, and S. Wiener of St Nicholas Hospital, Carlton, Australia, appeared (J Med Genet 14:46, 1950).
But now the story is out: The reason for the perhaps 35% excess of males over females in institutions and classes for the mentally retarded