- Janet Rowley
Janet Davison Rowley (born 1925) is an American human
geneticist and the first scientist to identify achromosomal translocation as the cause ofleukemia and othercancer s.Janet Davison was born in
New York City in 1925, the only child of Hurford and Ethel Ballantyne Davison. Her father held a master of business administration fromHarvard Business School , and her mother a master's degree in education fromColumbia University . Her parents were educators at the college and high school levels, respectively, and her mother later gave up teaching to become a school librarian.Davison attended the academically challenging junior high school in
New Jersey and became especially interested in science. In 1940, aged 15, she was granted a scholarship to study in an advanced placement program at theUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she finished high school and the first two years of college, followed by completion of her degree at theUniversity of Chicago , where she earned aBachelor of Philosophy degree in 1944, abachelor of science degree in 1946, anddoctor of medicine degree in 1948, aged 23. She married Donald Adams Rowley, also a physician, the day after graduating from medical school. Rowley balanced family life with her career by working part-time as she raised four sons. She began full-time research when the youngest was 12 years old.After earning her medical license in 1951, Dr. Rowley worked as attending physician at the Infant and Prenatal Clinics in the Department of Public Health,
Montgomery County, Maryland . In 1955 she took up a research post atChicago 's Dr.Julian Levinson Foundation, a clinic for children withdevelopmental disabilities , where she remained until 1961. She also taughtneurology at the University of Illinois School of Medicine.In 1962, after a year in
England as anNIH trainee, studying the patternDNA replication in normal and abnormal humanchromosome s, Dr. Rowley returned to the University of Chicago, as a research associate in the Department ofHematology . She became an associate professor in 1969, and a full professor in 1977. In the 1970s, she further developed the use of existing methods of quinacrine fluorescence andGiemsa staining to identifychromosome s, and demonstrated that the abnormalPhiladelphia chromosome implicated in certain types of leukemia was involved in a translocation with chromosome 9 in some cases. Translocation is the process by which a piece of one chromosome breaks off and joins another chromosome, or when two chromosomes exchange material when both break. She also identified translocation between chromosomes 8 and 21 inacute myelogenous leukemia .When Dr. Rowley published her findings in the 1970s, she argued that specific translocations caused specific diseases, going against the established view of the cause of
cancer which gave little significance to chromosomal abnormalities. Although there was some resistance to her ideas at first, her work has proven immensely influential, and by 1990 over seventy translocations had been identified across different cancers.In 1984, Dr. Rowley was made the Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, a position she still holds, as well as serving as the interim deputy dean for science since 2001. In 1998, she was one of three scientists awarded the prestigious
Lasker Award for their work on translocation, and received theNational Medal of Science in 1999. She has published over four hundred articles and continues her research at the University of Chicago.References
*National Library of Medicine. [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_282.html Biography: Dr. Janet Davison Rowley]
*The University of Chicago Medical Center. [http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/1998/19980920-rowley-lasker.php Press Release, 1998 Lasker Award to Janet Rowley] , 1998
*The University of Chicago Medical Center. [http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/1999/19990427-rowley-nms-cerem.php Janet Rowley, M.D., receives prestigious National Medal of Science at White House ceremony, April 27] , 1999
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