Catching a Cancer

The human papillomavirus is a known cause of cervical and other cancers. New techniques have energized the search for viruses.

Mentors at the Rockefeller Institute had warned Peyton Rous not to waste his career fooling with "the cancer question." Then he got the bright idea that tumors might be contagious. Rous extracted part of a sarcoma from a hen, strained out the cells and injected the remnants into another bird. The second hen also developed cancer. Something hidden inside the tumor must be causing the cancer. His culprit: a virus.
Rous' finding was met with such resounding disbelief that he soon abandoned the entire line of research. He returned to it 20 years later, still on the unpopular side of scientific opinion. More years passed, until Rous was finally vindicated with a Nobel Prize "for his discovery of tumor-inducing viruses" 56 years after he began his work, in 1910.

Source: SCIENCE DAILY