User:RNER0918/Sarah Stewart (cancer researcher)

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Stewart joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1935-1944 while completing her PhD at the University of Chicago. During her time there, she took part in developing a vaccine for gangrene, which helped many soldiers during the second world war. She later left her position in the NIH in order to pursue her goals in the research field as a commissioned officer of the United States Public Health Service at the National Cancer Institute in 1951, which was to prove that there was a connection between cancers and viruses. This proved to be difficult for her due to a number of reasons. Firstly, she was a woman, when women were first allowed to be doctors they were generally pushed to be in the gynecological department and Sarah was not the exception. In addition, the two fields of cancer research and viruses were thought to be completely separate and it was arbitrary at the time to think otherwise. At the time it was thought that virologists were not qualified enough to take part in cancer research and microbiologists were overqualified to do it.

Despite all of these obstacles she continued to pursue her passion and made leaps and bounds in this field. She even helped to identify other viruses in her lifetime, viruses such as herpes, Burkitt's and what are known as C-type viruses. Stewart developed an interest in researching viral links to cancer in light of the pioneering research of Jonas Salk in developing a vaccine for the virus which caused polio.

She left the NIH to become professor at Georgetown University in 1971.

Polyoma Virus Research

Stewart is credited with discovering the Polyomavirus in 1953. She and research partner, Dr. Bernice E. Eddy, were successful in growing the virus in 1958 and the SE (Stewart-Eddy) polyoma virus is named after them. They were able to prove that the polyoma virus could create 20 different kinds of tumors in mice as well as other animals. Stewart was the first credited to successfully demonstrate that viruses causing cancer could be spread from animal to animal. This experiment and its results, amongst other similar experiments, led many researchers to becoming interested in the field viral oncology.

In 1951, Stewart was reassigned to the Marine Hospital in Baltimore where she finally was able to work in the field of cancer. Sarah Stewart was developing her research at about the same time as a scientist named Ludwik Gross. When Stewart was attempting to confirm Ludwik Gross's work on the leukemia virus in July of 1952, she instead found solid tumors on the parotid glands of the mice. Gross was unaware of Stewart's research until he was contacted by her regarding how her research did not arrive to the same conclusion as Gross did and some questions she had about his findings. However, Stewart was also unaware that Gross had already observed parotid tumors, leading her to deem it as her own discovery.

Stewart needed a collaborator to help increase the understanding of the parotid tumor virus, which is when Bernice Eddy joined the team. Together, Stewart and Eddy were successful in growing the polyoma virus in 1958. However, the discovery was initially credited to both Gross and Stewart and Eddy and eventually the virus was named after Stewart and Eddy, now known as the SE polyoma virus. Gross was infuriated because, traditionally, it is the scientist who discovers something first that gets to name it. Gross believed that he discovered the polyoma virus first during his initial experiments with the leukemia virus. However, Stewart was also insistent that she found it first in the summer of 1952 before she met Gross and that the polyoma virus was produced under different conditions and different mouse strains than Gross's. Most organizations and researchers credited Steward and Eddy for the finding though Gross did not let his frustrations go unheard and wrote a number of letter to publishers. However, Eddy later admitted that Gross found the virus first, but she knew Stewart would never admit it.