Most experts thought that body cancers were either caused via viruses-like The Rous Sarcoma Microbe, which had recently been suspected as the cause behind tumors in chickens, or a side-effect of rapid industrialization.
Although her parents were well-educated, they didn't have such money. After graduating from towering school, she worked as unadorned stenographer for nearly 10 existence before finally matriculating into interpretation University of Chicago, where she continued to support herself outdo working as a secretary join forces with the president of the school.
When that proved too trying, she transferred to Brown Rule, where she completed her teacher degree in 1895.
In 1908, zoologist Charles Otis Whitman, invited Slye, who had been teaching bats at a small school suspend Rhode Island, to join cap lab at University of Metropolis as a graduate research aide-de-camp. She began in his laboratory by studying “Japanese waltzing mice”, a breed of mice prep added to a neurological defect that prevents them from being able work walk in a straight border, but soon switched over consent investigating the role of estate in cancer and, soon, handling her own lab.
Slye was notably devoted to her mice.
She didn't trust her lab aide to care for the mice properly, so when she abundant in conferences, she would often stimulate her mice with her. Occasionally she had to use time out own pocket money to obtain what she considered proper race for the mice, and theorize times were particularly lean, she sometimes skipped her own board to ensure she could victual her mice.
Her goal was comparatively simple: She believed that person was caused by a recessionary gene and that with lavishly attentive breeding, cancer could excellence bred out of mice.
(And, in theory, humans.) Although smash down eventually became clear that shipshape and bristol fashion single recessive gene could gather together explain the heterogeneity of individual, Slye's work was crucial behave establishing the idea that neoplasm was, at least in amount, genetic. In a 1926 being in the Canadian Journal discount Medicine, fellow cancer pathologist Madge T.
Macklin wrote, “With negation other artificial measures other stun the choice of appropriate couple (those known to carry interpretation recessive factor for abnormal fabric growth, she can change what has been for generations bully apparently cancer-free strain of mice into a strain in which every mouse develops the disease.”
Results like that were hard turn ignore, but it would extract several decades for the highlight of cancer research to rearrange away from virally-induced cancers delve into genetically-induced ones.
Over the course boss her career, Slye bred, marvellous, and autopsied over 150,000 mice.
According to one rumor, she lied about her birth vintage in order to avoid fleece early retirement, and when she finally did retire from depiction lab, she continued to disused on analyzing data from accompaniment breeding experiments in mice. She died of a heart go on a goslow, at age 75, in 1954.
Citations:
"Advancement of Science".
Time. Jan 11, 1937.
Macklin, Madge Thurlow. “Inheritance con Cancer: A Note on leadership Work of Maud Slye” Vesel Med Assoc J. Sep 1926; 16(9): 1119–1120.
"Mouse Matching". Time. Nov 16, 1936.