A Conversation With The Matriarch of Modern Cancer Genetics

Q. You didn’t start out as a geneticist, but as a medical doctor. I take it your research career was accidental?

A. Absolutely. For much of the late 1950s, I worked a few days a week as a medical doctor at a Cook County Hospital clinic for retarded children. With young children at home, I would only work part time.

Then in 1961, my husband had a sabbatical from the University of Chicago to England. I needed something to do for the year we’d be over there. Because of my work with retarded children, I was interested in inherited diseases. It had recently been found that Down Syndrome was linked to an extra copy of chromosome 21. So, a friend arranged an introduction to Laszlo Lajtha, a hematologist in Oxford. He was doing groundbreaking work on the pattern of replication of bone marrow cells. Lajtha agreed to allow me to come to his lab to extend his work to replication of chromosomes, which I was interested in, and to learn more about his emerging field, cytogenetics.

Q. What was the state of genetics research in 1961?

A. The revolution was far from happening. This was less than a decade after Watson and Crick’s discovery. We were only beginning to have a notion of what DNA was like. There weren’t the right tools yet to stain it, cut it apart, examine and manipulate it.

Still, even with limited technology, there had been some advances. One of the most important came in 1960, when Peter Nowell and David Hungerford of Philadelphia discovered that one small chromosome was about half the normal size in many patients with CML, a type of leukemia. According to a convention at the time, this became known as the Philadelphia chromosome.

I enjoyed my laboratory work with Lajtha. I decided that when I returned to Chicago, I’d try to find another part-time job, though this time in research....