Francis Peyton Rous

Rous was born in Woodlawn, Maryland in 1879 and received his B.A. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University.[2]

Rous was involved in the discovery of the role of viruses in the transmission of certain types of cancer. On October 13, 1966, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work.

In 1911, as a pathologist, he made his seminal observation that a malignant tumor (specifically, a sarcoma) growing on a domestic chicken could be transferred to another fowl simply by exposing the healthy bird to a cell-free filtrate.[3][4] This finding, that cancer could be transmitted by a virus (now known as the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus), was widely discredited by most of the field's experts at that time. Since he was a relative newcomer, it was several years before anyone even tried to replicate his prescient results. However, some influential researchers were impressed enough to nominate him to the Nobel Committee as early as 1926 (and in many subsequent years). Rous finally received the award 40 years later at the age of 87; he remains the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology [5].

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Peyton Rous was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1940,[1] and he won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1958 and the National Medal of Science in 1965.

In his later life he wrote biographies of Simon Flexner[6] and Karl Landsteiner.[7]

His wife Marion died in 1985. His daughter Marni Hodgkin was a children's book editor, and the wife of another Nobel Prize winner, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.[8]