Francis Peyton Rous, 1879-1970

Abstract

Before Peyton Rous died at the age of ninety he had been acclaimed as an outstanding leader in the field of pathology and particularly in cancer research. Before he received the well-merited award of a Nobel prize in 1966, he had worked unremittingly for more than fifty years, piling fact upon solid fact: yet for many of those years his outstanding discovery of a virus causing a tumour in fowls was disregarded. Rous, however, was throughout his working life constantly excited by every new fact he brought to light and this made his life a truly satisfying one. There is no evidence of any scientific achievement among his forebears. His great-grandfather had come to America from Henham in Suffolk in the early 1800s. His father, Charles Rous, was a grain broker in Baltimore; he had married Frances Anderson Wood from Virginia. Peyton was born on 5 October 1879. When he was eleven, with two younger sisters, their father died. Their mother, though she had been brought up in Texas, remained in Baltimore, though with little money, so that her children could have the best possible education. So Peyton was taught at a public school and a public high school in Baltimore and from there he obtained a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University and Medical School. While an undergraduate he earned some money—in fact five dollars—by writing articles for a Baltimore newspaper on ‘The Flower of the M onth’. His ambition was to be a naturalist.