Dr. Peter Nowell, Who Helped Transform Cancer Rese
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Posted On: 01/15/2017 1:37:26 PM
Dr. Peter Nowell, Who Helped Transform Cancer Research, Dies at 88
Dr. Nowell and a colleague discovered the first genetic defect proven to cause cancer, which led to major advances by other scientists decades later.
(New York Times)
Here's a good article. What a cruel end for someone who made such an important discovery. I just posted the first part of the article, there is much more if you go to the link.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/...story.html
Peter Nowell, a medical researcher who, in the simple process of cleaning slides bearing leukemic cells, helped uncover the first clear sign of a genetic cause of cancer, died Dec. 26 in Newtown Square, Pa. He was 88.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, Kristin Nowell.
Dr. Nowell, who spent nearly his entire career at the University of Pennsylvania, was working in a laboratory there in the late 1950s when he made his seminal discovery. He was studying samples of chronic myeloid leukemia — a disorder of the blood and bone marrow then considered a death sentence — and happened to wash his slides with tap water instead of a laboratory solution.
Viewing the newly cleaned slides under a microscope, he saw that the water had caused the cell’s chromosomes, the threadlike carriers of genes, to expand.
‘‘I didn’t know anything about chromosomes,’’ he told the Philadelphia Inquirer years later, ‘‘but it seemed a shame to throw this away.’’
Dr. Nowell partnered with David Hungerford, a graduate student at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Analyzing the white blood cells of patients with this particular form of leukemia, Hungerford noticed a consistent aberration: One of the 46 chromosomes, the 22nd, was noticeably short. The chromosome was named the Philadelphia chromosome,
‘‘Every cell had it, and it was there in every typical case’’ of the condition, Dr. Nowell told a publication of the University of Pennsylvania. ‘‘So that argued both for, one, a genetic change as being important in the development of this form of cancer, and, two, that tumors might indeed arise from a single cell in which such a change occurred.’’
The finding was a turning point. Until then, most scientists believed viruses to be the cause of cancer
Dr. Nowell and a colleague discovered the first genetic defect proven to cause cancer, which led to major advances by other scientists decades later.
(New York Times)
Here's a good article. What a cruel end for someone who made such an important discovery. I just posted the first part of the article, there is much more if you go to the link.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/...story.html
Peter Nowell, a medical researcher who, in the simple process of cleaning slides bearing leukemic cells, helped uncover the first clear sign of a genetic cause of cancer, died Dec. 26 in Newtown Square, Pa. He was 88.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, Kristin Nowell.
Dr. Nowell, who spent nearly his entire career at the University of Pennsylvania, was working in a laboratory there in the late 1950s when he made his seminal discovery. He was studying samples of chronic myeloid leukemia — a disorder of the blood and bone marrow then considered a death sentence — and happened to wash his slides with tap water instead of a laboratory solution.
Viewing the newly cleaned slides under a microscope, he saw that the water had caused the cell’s chromosomes, the threadlike carriers of genes, to expand.
‘‘I didn’t know anything about chromosomes,’’ he told the Philadelphia Inquirer years later, ‘‘but it seemed a shame to throw this away.’’
Dr. Nowell partnered with David Hungerford, a graduate student at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Analyzing the white blood cells of patients with this particular form of leukemia, Hungerford noticed a consistent aberration: One of the 46 chromosomes, the 22nd, was noticeably short. The chromosome was named the Philadelphia chromosome,
‘‘Every cell had it, and it was there in every typical case’’ of the condition, Dr. Nowell told a publication of the University of Pennsylvania. ‘‘So that argued both for, one, a genetic change as being important in the development of this form of cancer, and, two, that tumors might indeed arise from a single cell in which such a change occurred.’’
The finding was a turning point. Until then, most scientists believed viruses to be the cause of cancer
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