Charlotte Friend

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Charlotte Friend
Born March 11, 1921
New York City, New York
Died January 13, 1987(1987-01-13) (aged 65)
New York, New York
Residence New York, New York
Nationality U.S.
Fields Virology
Institutions New York University, Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research
Alma mater Hunter College, Yale
Known for Discovery of the Friend Leukemia Virus and Friend erythroleukemia cells, her research is still widely used today. It has become especially important in the field of HIV/AIDS research following her death.

Charlotte Friend, PhD (March 11, 1921 - January 13, 1987 in New York) was an American virologist. She is best known for her discovery of the Friend Leukemia Virus.[1] She helped to establish the concept of the oncovirus, studied the role of the host immune response in disease development, and helped define modern retrovirology.

Biography

Born and raised in New York, she was the youngest daughter of Russian emigrants. She graduated from Hunter High School and Hunter College in New York City and enlisted in the United States Navy in 1943. As a lieutenant junior grade she worked in the naval hospital in Shoemaker, California. After the war ended she enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at Yale, where she received her PhD in 1950 with a thesis on the effects of sodium salicylate (aspirin) on antigen-antibody reactions. As a post-doc she worked in the Sloan-Kettering Institute under the direction of Cornelius P. Rhoads. In 1966 she accepted a position as Professor and Director of the Center for Experimental Cell Biology at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

During her lifetime she was President of the Harvey Society, the American Association for Cancer Research and the New York Academy of Sciences. Charlotte Friend also served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Virus Cancer Program of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention of the National Cancer Institute. Over the years, she served on a number of other advisory committees and on the editorial boards of several cancer and hematology journals. In all, she published 163 papers, 70 of which she wrote by herself or with one other author.

On her sixtieth birthday she was diagnosed with a lymphoma. She died at the age of 65.

Legacy

  • Cemented the knowledge that virus can be responsible for some types of cancer.
  • Friend Virus is today the model to study viral leukemogenesis [2]
  • Helped set the foundations for the study of retrovirus. Her techniques and characterisation studies allowed the future isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus.
  • Observed the relation between liver cell damage and virus release and elevation of enzyme levels. Furthermore she detected that increases in serum enzymes are also a feature of some human leukaemia, both still of vital clinical relevance today.[3]

Prizes

  • 1962 Alfred P. Sloan Award in Cancer Research
  • 1986 Honorary Doctor of Science, Brandeis University

References

  1. ↑ Cell-free transmission in adult Swiss mice of a disease having the character of a leukemia. J. Exp. Med. 105:307­18.
  2. ↑ L. Diamond and S. R. Wolman, eds., "Viral Oncogenesis and Cell Differentiation: The Contributions of Charlotte Friend." (Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 567, 1989).
  3. ↑ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2136542/

External links

  • BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
  • Charlotte Friend Papers at The Mount Sinai Archives, The Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York, N.Y.
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