Peyton Rous

Peyton Rous was an American pathologist who in 1910, working at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, showed that a malignant tumor in a hen could be transmitted to other chickens using a cell-free, filtered extract, evidence that a virus could cause cancer. The finding met deep skepticism, since cancer was widely assumed to arise entirely from within a cell rather than from an infectious agent, and it took fifty-six years for the discovery to be honored with the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the longest gap between a discovery and its Nobel recognition on record. The agent Rous identified is now known as Rous sarcoma virus. Born in Texas in 1879, he remained at Rockefeller for his entire career and continued cancer research showing that malignant transformation happens through a gradual series of cellular steps rather than a single sudden change. He died in 1970.