Peyton Rous

Peyton Rous was not often seen at The Century Club. He sometimes came with his wife to the Christmas musicales, and once in a while he brought a visiting scientist from Britain or the Continent to lunch. He said he wanted them to see something of the distinguished culture that lies behind the American scene. But he had no urgent need of the Club’s special amenities—companionship, conversation, and cuisine—for these he had in his domestic life with his wife, Marion DeKay, daughter and niece of Centurions [her father Charles de Kay and uncle Richard Watson Gilder]. Above all, he had his ever-absorbing work at the Rockefeller Institute. Before he became a member of The Century Association, in 1921, he had done the brilliant research on virus-induced cancer that at long last, in 1966, brought him the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and had gone on to other investigations, fully deserving at least two more such awards.

Born in 1879 in Baltimore, he took his A.B. in 1899 at the Johns Hopkins University, and his M.D. in 1904. After an internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he spent two years in the department of pathology at the University of Michigan. In 1906, Simon Flexner called him to the Rockefeller Institute and put him to work on cancer. Within a few months, Rous met the challenge by his pioneer discovery of malignant tumor of fowls caused by a filtrable virus. This was ultimately to change the whole course of cancer research, but it was ahead of its time and he put such work aside. Now the “Rous sarcoma” is known to pathologists the world around.

During World War I, foreseeing an immense demand at the front for blood transfusions, Rous, pioneering again, with his assistant J. R. Turner, Jr., worked out a way to preserve blood several weeks for use in emergencies. Another assistant, Oswald H. Robertson, took the method to the British lines in Belgium and there set up the world’s first blood bank. Robertson was promptly decorated by the British government, but Peyton had to wait thirty-six years for public recognition and a gold medal from the Association of American Physicians. When he became a Centurion, he was engaged with Philip McMaster on an experimental study of the gall bladder that greatly helped physicians to understand the functions of that previously underrated organ. There is no space here to mention other fundamental and ingenious investigations which he kept up to the age of ninety, when, by an ironically undeserved fate, the progress of a malignant tumor halted his work.

As speaker and writer, Peyton commanded a graceful style. His few lectures, biographical memoirs and other occasional papers suggest that he might have been a notable essayist, had he not been drafted for a more practical use of his talent. From 1921 to the end of his active career, he edited, with magistral authority, the Rockefeller Institute’s Journal of Experimental Medicine. Many are the scientists for whom his marginal comments, interlineations, and deletions provided postgraduate instruction in technical writing.

Peyton said that in his youth he was touchy and argumentative. In later years, when present-day Centurions knew him, he was calm and considerate, modestly accepting his international fame, revered by fellow scientists everywhere, and loved by those who knew him best.

George W. Corner
1972 Century Association Yearbook

The twentieth century introduced a golden age of medicine and medical discovery, and Centurion Rous epitomized its glory. He was trained at Johns Hopkins during its trailblazing beginnings, and his scientific career spanned almost all of the fife of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, of which he was a conspicuous adornment. He belonged to that golden age, not only chronologically, but because he was a naturalist, by temperament an intense, dedicated perfectionist, who knew there was nothing quite as wonderful as the discovery of natural law, and no field in nature so challenging and rewarding as the study of disease.

He learned much about several diseases. What he learned about cancer seemed to become more and more important as time went on. It took the Swedes more than fifty years to measure his contribution to cancer and give him their Nobel medal. By then, he had collected almost all of the important awards a physician may aspire to, and a host of honors of many kinds.

Rous had great pride and pleasure in his family and friends. His circle was restricted so that nothing might seriously distract him from his calling, but it included The Century and his devotion to it, as well as his discrimination, are represented by younger members he gracefully sponsored during his long affiliation.

Gilbert Dalldorf
1972 Century Association Yearbook

Born in Baltimore, Rous received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1905. After two years as instructor of pathology at the University of Michigan, he took over leadership of the cancer research laboratory at The Rockefeller Institute, begun a few years earlier by the institute’s director, Simon Flexner. Soon after, he was able to prove that some tumors in chickens are actually initiated and driven by viruses that determine their forms as well.

In 1915, he began study in physiological pathology, and he did not return to the theme of cancer for 20 years. During that period, he also was occupied with work on blood and the liver and did pioneer research on blood transfusion with J. R. Turner and O. H. Robertson. This led to the establishment in 1917 of the world’s first blood bank near the front lines of the Entente Forces in Belgium.

In 1934, Dr. Rous’s Rockefeller colleague Richard Shope asked him to examine a warren of jackrabbits whose “warts” he had definitively shown were caused by a virus. When Dr. Rous confirmed that the warts were benign tumors that had the potential to become cancerous, he returned his full focus to investigating the virus theory of cancer.

In 1915, Rous married Marion Eckford de Kay, the daughter of Charles Augustus de Kay, the founder of the National Arts Club and a member of the Fencing Hall of Fame. They had three daughters: Marion, Ellen and Phoebe. Marion’s husband, Alan Hodgkin, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1963, three years before Rous received the same award. Phoebe married Thomas J. Wilson, who became Director of the Harvard University Press.

Rous was a foreign member of The Royal Societies of England and Denmark and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He received an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, a National Medal of Science and a United Nations Prize for Cancer Research.

Rous was sponsored for the Century in 1921 by his father-in-law and remained a member until his death in 1970.

James Charlton
“Centurions on Stamps,” Part I (Exhibition, 2010)