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George N. Papanicolaou – His Life and Oeuvre
Leopold G. Koss
Montefiore Hospital
Bronx, NY
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One of the greatest contributions of Canadian pathology to health care was the cervix
cancer detection program established in the Province of British Columbia by Fidler around 1950.
Subsequently, he was ably assisted by David Boyes who, as a speaker at this Symposium, will describe the
program in detail. Inevitably, the program was the first systematic application of the concepts of
cytologic detection of precursors of cervical cancer, promulgated by Papanicolaou and Traut, starting
with an article on this topic published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1941. I
was privileged to have known, and worked with, Dr. Papanicolaou between 1952 and 1961 when I was a young
attending at Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, now known as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center. Subsequent to Papanicolaou's move to Florida in 1961 to be the head of a cancer
institute, named after him (but initially organized and run by a Canadian gynecologist, become
cytologist, J. Ernest Ayre), I remained in contact with him during the brief remaining period of his life
and I was honored by Mrs. Papanicolaou's friendship and her gift to me of many photographs illustrating
the early years of her husband's life. Thus, Papanicolaou's life and oeuvre, that I will discuss during
this meeting, will be based on a number of not previously seen photographs describing his early years as
a physician-to-be in Athens (Greece), Ph.D. in biology working in Monaco, and his early years in the
United States, starting with his first employment as an assistant in anatomy at the Cornell University
Medical Center in 1915. I will also describe the efforts to secure for Papanicolaou the Nobel Award and
the reasons why this effort failed.
Clearly, Papanicolaou was one of the towering scientific figures of the 20th century whose
concepts and contributions saved innumerable lives of women, reducing cancer of the uterine cervix from
the dominant malignant tumor of the female to a relatively uncommon illness, at the onset of the 21st
century.
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