Maud slye biography of william shakespeare book

Maud Slye devoted her life to cancer research by investigating the inheritability of the disease in mice. Performing extensive breeding studies on the hereditary transmission of cancer, she kept meticulous pedigree records and autopsied thousands of mice during her lifetime. Her work was controversial, however; advocating the archiving of complete medical records for individuals, she believed that human beings could eradicate cancer by choosing mates with the appropriate genotype.

Sometimes referred to as "America's Curie," Slye received wide publicity for her work and was honored by many organizations. Her family, though poor, traced their ancestry back to John Alden of the Plymouth colony.

Beverley Birch spent her childhood roaming vast plains and deep forests near her home in East Africa, dreaming of becoming an intrepid explorer in fantastic, far-away places.

At age seventeen, Slye entered the University of Chicago with savings of forty dollars and the desire to become a scientist. Attending the university for three years, she supported herself by working as a secretary for university president William Harper. Hired as a teacher at the Rhode Island State Normal School, she stayed at the institution until In Slye received a grant to do postgraduate work at the University of Chicago.

Interested in the hereditary basis of disease, she began her work with six Japanese "waltzing" mice which were afflicted with a hereditary neurological disorder. Slye became intrigued by the inheritability of cancer when she heard of several heads of cattle at the Chicago stock yards—all with cancer of the eye—that had come from the same ranch.

Maud Slye, American pathologist.

Inspired by this and other data, Slye went forward with her studies, breeding cancerous mice with one another as well as healthy mice with other healthy mice. In , Slye became a member of the university's newly created Sprague Memorial Institute, and in she presented her first paper on cancer before the American Society for Cancer Research.

Becoming director of the Cancer Laboratory at the University of Chicago in , she was promoted to assistant professor in , then to associate professor in In , Slye left her mice in the care of an assistant and took her first vacation in twenty-six years earlier, when she had visited her ailing mother in California, she rented a boxcar and took her mice with her.

Although Slye discredited a prevailing theory that stated cancer was contagious, it became clear as her work proceeded that the appearance of cancer in an individual was not as simple as the presence of one gene. In later years, Slye posited that two conditions were necessary to produce cancer: inherited susceptibility, and prolonged irritation of the cancer-susceptible tissues.