Rous, Peyton

Rous, Peyton (1911) A sarcoma of the fowl transmissible by an agent separable from the tumor cells. Journal of Experimental Medicine. 13,397-411. Varmus, H. and Weinburg R. A. (1993) Genes and the Biology of Cancer. 

The following is from the front page plus part of the discussion of the historic paper by Peyton Rous ... 

A SARCOMA OF THE FOWL TRANSMISSIBLE BY AN AGENT SEPARABLE FROM THE TUMOUR CELLS BY PEYTON ROUS, M.D. 

Retroviruses have featured prominently in recent advances in the molecular understanding of cancer. Most retroviruses do not kill their host cells but remain integrated in the cellular DNA, replicating when the cell divides. Some retroviruses, classified as RNA tumor viruses, contain an oncogene that can cause the cell to grow abnormally (see Fig. 12-47). The first retrovirus of this type to be studied was the Rous sarcoma virus (also called avian sarcoma virus Fig. 26-31), named for F. Peyton Rous, who studied chicken tumors now known to be caused by this virus. Since the initial discovery of oncogenes by Flarold Varmus and Michael Bishop, many dozens of such genes have been found in retroviruses. 

The first virus linked to tumor production was discovered in 1908 by Ellerman and Bang. Their finding was followed in 1911 by the better known discovery by Peyton Rous of a virus that produces sarcomas in chickens (now known as Rous sarcoma virus, or RSV). Later (1932) Shope showed that a papilloma virus produced cutaneous tumors in rabbits, and Lucke (1934) showed that adenoviruses produced renal adenocarcinoma in the frog. These and other discoveries made in the 1940s and 1950s indicated that exposure to certain viruses could result in tumor production. However, viral oncogenes had not yet been identified, and skeptics... 

Peyton Rous in his laboratories at the Rockefeller University, and Isaac Berenblum of the Weitzman Institute in Israel, together with Philipe Shubik were, back in the 1940s, the first to reveal that certain chemicals, apparently not carcinogenic themselves, could somehow... 

F. Peyton Rous, who studied chicken tumors now known to be caused by this virus. Since the initial discovery of oncogenes by Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop, many dozens of such genes have been found in retroviruses. 

The first of these stemmed from Peyton Rous s discovery in 1910 that a type of cancer common in chickens was caused by a virus and could be transmitted artificially from one chicken to another. In 1966 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery made more than half a century earlier. Not long after this, Peter Duesberg discovered the oncogene responsible for the infectious character of this cancer. He found that chickens infected with an RNA virus containing such a gene developed cancer, but did not develop cancer when infected by a virus from which the oncogene had been removed. 

In 1910, the American pathologist Francis Peyton Rous (1879-1970), at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, succeeded in the transmission of the virus later named after him (the Rous sarcoma virus) from one diseased chicken to other chickens. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1966. 

The association of viruses and cancer was demonstrated by Peyton Rous in 1911, when he used ceU-free extracts from a tumor extracted from a Plymouth Rock chicken to induce tumors in healthy chickens. Fifty-five years later, four years before his death at the age of ninety, Rous was awarded a Nobel Prize. 

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