Chapter 21 : Dr. Rous’s Prize-Winning Chicken

Abstract:

One hundred years ago today, Peyton Rous published the first in a series of papers describing experiments that began with work on a sarcoma from a single Plymouth Rock hen. In that initial paper, Rous showed that bits of the tumor could establish new tumors when injected into healthy chickens. A year later, in 1911, Rous published what has become a classic in the annals of virology—A Sarcoma of the Fowl Transmissible by an Agent Separable from the Tumor Cells—reporting that the tumors were transmissible from one chicken to another by injection of a cell-free, filtered homogenate of the tumor tissue. The conclusion, since confirmed a thousand times over, was that a virus caused the tumors. The virus, now known as Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), went on to play a starring role in twentieth century biomedical research.