Peyton RousBorn 5 Oct 1879; died 16 Feb 1970 at age 90.{np] whose discovery of cancer-inducing viruses earned him a share of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1966. Rous joined the Rockefeller Institute in New York as a pathologist in 1909. The same year, a local farmer brought a chicken with a tumour for testing. Having determined it to be a sarcoma, Rous discovered that it could be "transferred" into a healthy chicken by grafting tumour cells. Surprisingly, injecting cell-free filtrates from the tumour also led to sarcomas in healthy chickens. By 1914, his laboratory had discovered three distinct types of avian sarcomas. Although he did not isolate specific agents, Rous postulated that chicken tumours were due to "filterable agents"-eventually identified as Rous sarcoma virus. |
