A pathologist, Francis Peyton Rous, was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1966 for his discovery of carcinogenic viruses. Born in Texas in 1879 and raised in Baltimore, Rous received his professional indoctrination entirely at Johns Hopkins, where he received both his bachelors (1900) and medical degrees (1905). After beginning his internship -- again at Hopkins -- he was quickly confirmed in his preference for research over clinical work, and therefore decided to accept a lower-paying position at the University of Michigan, rather than continue down the clinical path. Relegated to a position that had him working essentially as a technician, Rous found compensation in Ann Arbor through his department head, Alfred Warthin, who encouraged him to apply for and accept a fellowship in 1907 to study morbid anatomy at Dresden, where he honed his skills as a researcher.

Rous returned from Europe to take up a grant from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research to pursue research on lymphocytes, during the course of which, he caught the eye of Simon Flexner, and earned a call to the staff at Rockefeller. From the time of his move to New York, Rous' research gained enormous momentum. In 1909, his most important series of experiments examined the transmission of spontaneous cancerous tumors in chickens. Preparing a cell-free filtrate from a malignant sarcoma isolated from a chicken leg and injecting it into healthy hens, Rous discovered that the recipients developed precisely the same tumors as the donors, and that the tumors could be transmitted either by direct injection or through injection into fertilized eggs, hypothesizing that a virus was the agent responsible for transmission. Other tumors, too, turned out to be similarly transmissible, with similar fidelity in producing cancers of the donors in the recipients.

Using mice, however, Rous' initial efforts to assess whether tumors could be transmitted in mammals were unavailing until in 1932, his friend and Rockefeller colleague, Richard Shope, asked Rous to investigate the benign papillomas commonly found in wild rabbits which were shown to be transmissible by cell-free extracts. Despite mounting evidence for Rous' viral theory of cancer, there was considerable resistance among medical researchers to its acceptance, who argued that Rous had discovered a condition peculiar to birds and benign tumors, rather than malignant cancers. It was not until the 1950s that subsequent research in virology changed the situation and led to its inculcation as a central element in the theory of cancer origins.

Several other projects in which Rous participated resulted in important medical advances. During the First World War, he and Oswald Robertson were instrumental in developing a citrate-dextrose solution that, when added to preserved blood, provided nourishment and prevented clotting, extending its shelf life for up to four weeks. The practical result was the establishment of the first blood banks in 1918. Rous also exerted an influence over medical research through his position as long-time co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine and from the administrative heights of his perch at the Rockefeller.

Rous retired from the Institute at age 65 and accepted emeritus status. An innovative and remarkably productive researcher in a high-profile area in medical research, he was recipient of the laurels of his profession. A foreign member of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Medicine in England, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1939), the National Academy of Sciences, and several similar societies in Denmark, Norway, and France, and he received honorary degrees from eight universities, including Cambridge, Michigan, Yale, and Chicago. A winner of the Kovalenko Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Service Award of the American Cancer Society, the Lasker Award, the National Medal of Science, the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstädter Award, and the United Nations Prize for Cancer Research, his career was capped with receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1966, shared equally with cancer researcher Charles B. Huggins of the University of Chicago, whose research centered on the relationship between hormones and prostate cancer.

Rous had three daughters with his wife, Marion Eckford DeKay, one of whom, Marion, married the Nobel laureate Alan Hodgkin. Rous died on February 16, 1970.

The papers of Peyton Rous are a large and diverse assemble of correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs relating to the medical researcher and Nobel laureate who developed the viral theory of the origins of cancer.

The collection includes a substantial series of files relating to Rous' involvement as editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, providing a glimpse into his editorial philosophy, and more generally, his philosophy on medical research.

Provenance

Gift of Francis Peyton Rous, 1969; the Rous estate, 1970; and Paul F. Cranefield, 1973 (accession numbers 1969-756ms, 1970-1563ms, and 1973-2538ms).

Preferred citation

Cite as: Peyton Rous Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Separated material

Two sets of Rous's reprints were transferred to the Printed Materials Department for storage. These includes two boxes of reprints by Rous (call no. 616 pam.r) and seven boxes of reprints by other researchers (616 pam.ro).

Related material

The papers of Rous' former assistants, Oswald Hope Robertson (call no. B R546) and James B. Murphy (B M956), contain correspondence with Rous and information on their work in establishing blood banks during the First World War and after. Rous appears as a correspondent in several other collections, including the papers of Simon Flexner, Eugene Opie, Leon Cole, and Harold Amoss.

Bibliography

Physiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics Note

The papers of Peyton Rous include correspondence, lectures, articles, reports, laboratory records, reprints, and photographs. These materials record in detail Rous' long scientific career and his discoveries which revolutionized several areas in the life sciences. His discovery in 1910 that viruses cause malignant tumors in fowl and his subsequent work in tumor virology linked intellectual and disciplinary trends in medical physiology and bacteriology at the turn of the century with those of molecular biology in the 1950s. The founding of the sub-specialty of tumor virology also reoriented the course of cancer research. His innovative laboratory techniques, especially in tissue culture, advanced the course of cytology and microbiology. The files on Rous (approximately 200 folders, 1910s-1960s) contain annual reports, lectures, and papers describing these diverse studies.

During World War I, in collaboration with several colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute (notably Oswald H. Robertson), Rous devised methods for preserving human blood through the use of blood banks that made more transfusions possible. This important project is documented in the Oswald H. Robertson correspondence (1917-1960).

In addition to documenting his paradigmatic researches, the collection also contains hundreds of files on the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), of which Rous was an editor from 1921 to 1970. These files contain a wealth of information on editorial policies, referee accounts, scientific controversies, and changing trends in the life sciences. Rous' broader institutional and social influence is reflected in the files on scientific institutions and organizations, including the Rockefeller Institute, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

The Rous Papers also contain material on Rous' Nobel Prize, which he received fifty-six years after his historic discovery, an interesting episode in the history of the life sciences. Rous' correspondence with several colleagues (especially with C. H. Andrewes), together with the boxes on the Nobel Prize, reveal aspects of the delayed recognition of his contributions, the controversies surrounding the question of whether tumors arose spontaneously or were induced, and the events leading to the final acceptance of his work.

The Rous correspondence is divided into two main sections: 1) personal-professional correspondence, and 2) editorial correspondence (JEM).

Series I. Correspondence:

Series II. Oswald H. Robertson Material

Series III. Card files and Miscellaneous

Additional Biographical Notes:

William Meredith Stanley joined the Rockefeller Institute in 1931. After working briefly with W. J. V. Osterhout, he was transferred to the Princeton branch to set up a research project on the tobacco mosaic virus, work that focused mainly on protein chemistry. At that time virology had already grown into a major field of biomedical research, but no one had yet succeeded in isolating a single virus. Stanley's skills in bio-organic chemistry, augmented by John Howard Northrop's cooperation, resulted in 1935 in the crystallization of the tobacco mosaic virus, a technical feat that attracted international attention. Stanley's conclusion that the reproductive material in the virus was an autocatalytic protein seemed to have solved the virus mystery, and to confirm the widespread belief in the primacy of proteins in heredity. Stanley's work, for which he had received the 1946 Nobel Prize (shared with James B. Sumner and Northrop), has generally been viewed as a cornerstone of molecular biology and a major landmark in the history of medicine.

Corporate Name(s)

• American Cancer Society.
• Century Association (New York, N.Y.)
• Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
• National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
• New York Academy of Medicine.
• Paul Ehrlich Stiftung
• Rockefeller Institute.
• Royal Society of Medicine Foundation.
• Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.

Genre(s)

• Articles
• Lectures
• Photographs

Personal Name(s)

• Addis, Thomas, 1881-1949
• Andrewes, C.H. (Christopher Howard), Sir
• Baudisch, Oskar
• Bayne-Jones, Stanhope, 1888-1970
• Beard, Joseph W., 1901-
• Berenblum, Isaac, 1903-
• Blankenhorn, Marion Arthur, 1885-1957
• Bronk, Detlev W., (Detlev Wulf), 1897-1975
• Cattell, James McKeen, 1860-1944
• Compton, Arthur Holly, 1892-1962
• Corner, George Washington, 1889-1981
• Crutcher, Katherine G.
• Cutler, Richard B.
• DeMaeyer, E. M.
• Dean, Henry R.
• Dolman, Claude E., (Claude Ernest), 1906-1994
• Dubos, René J. (René Jules), 1901-
• Flexner, Simon, 1863-1946
• Gasser, Herbert Spencer, 1888-1963
• Gilding, Henry P.
• Gregg, Alan, 1890-1957
• Gye, Will E.
• Hevesy, Georg von, 1885-1966
• Huggins, Charles Brenton, 1901-
• Johnson, Earl
• Karsner, Howard Thomas, b. 1879
• Kidd, John Graydon, 1908-
• Krumbhaar, E. B. , (Edward Bell), 1882-1966
• Landsteiner, Karl, 1868-1943
• Lipschutz, Alexander
• Loeb, Leo, 1869-1959
• LuckGe, Baldwin
• MacNider, William de Berniere, 1881-1951
• McDermott, Walsh, 1909-
• Mooser, Hermann
• Osler, William, Sir, 1849-1919
• Robertson, O. H. (Oswald Hope), 1886-1966
• Rogers, E. Stanfield
• Rous, Peyton, 1879-1970
• Shope, Richard E., (Richard Edwin), 1901-
• Smith, Frederick
• Stanley, Wendell Meredith, 1932-
• TenBroeck, Carl, 1885-1966
• Warthin, Aldred Scott, 1866-1931
• Whipple, George Hoyt, 1878-
• Wyckoff, Ralph W. G. (Ralph Walter Graystone), 1897-
• Zinsser, Hans, 1878-1940

Subject(s)

• Blood banks
• Blood--Research
• Cancer--Research
• Journal of Experimental Medicine
• Medical sciences
• Medicine, Experimental
• Medicine--Research
• Medicine--Research--Finance
• Nobel Prize
• Pathology
• Science publishing.
• Viruses
• World War, 1914-1918--Medical care