the woman who found the tumor that wasn’t leukemia

In 1953, a government cancer researcher inoculated mice with material from leukemic animals and found something nobody had documented before: tumors growing in a gland that had nothing to do with the experiment.

It took Sarah Stewart three decades, a second graduate degree, and a position she never registered for to get to do the work she really wanted to do. Once there, the virus she isolated produced twenty different kinds of tumors and helped prove, for the first time, that cancer could be infectious.

image credit: National Library of Medicine