In 1941, cancer researcher Charles B. Huggins treated patients suffering from advanced prostate cancer by removing the hormone the cancers needed to grow. Hormonal treatment has since become a mainstay of care for several types of cancer, including breast and gynecological cancers.
Presidential Medal of Freedom winner and geneticist Janet Davison Rowley, LAB’42, PhB’45, SB’46, MD’48, discovered the first consistent chromosomal abnormalities associated with cancer in the 1970s, demonstrating a link between cancer and genetics. She later was a key player in the development of the first precisely targeted anti-cancer drug.
Clifton Ragsdale, Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Organismal Biology and Anatomy, along with Organismal Biology graduate student Caroline Albertin and a team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley and Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology sequenced the genome of the California Two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides).
Building on the work of cancer researcher Charles B. Huggins, Elwood Jensen and fellow medical researcher Eugene Desombre identified the precise mechanism through which hormones drive cancer—by binding to a receptor protein in cells. The 1958 finding opened a new therapeutic front in breast cancer, leading to targeted treatments credited with saving many lives each year.
Zhe-Xi Luo, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at UChicago, was part of a team of researchers from UChicago and Beijing who discovered fossils of the earliest-known arboreal and subterranean mammals. The fossils suggest that early mammals were as ecologically diverse as modern mammals. Luo’s student David Grossnickle (Evolutionary Biology) also contributed to the research and was an author of one of the Science paper published on this discovery.
