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Up for sale a VERY RARE! "Tumor Viruses" Ludwik Gross Hand Signed TLS Dated 1962.
1904 – July 19, 1999) was a Polish-American virologist who discovered two
different tumor viruses, murine leukemia virus and
mouse polyomavirus, capable of
causing cancers in laboratory mice. He
was born on September 11, 1904, in Kraków, Poland to a prominent Jewish family. He studied for a
degree in medicine at the Jagiellonian University.
He escaped from occupied Poland in
1940 soon after the 1939 Nazi invasion and travelled to the United States,
ultimately serving in the United States Armed Forces during World War II. After the war, he joined other scientists
(notably Rosalyn Yalow, recipient
of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology) in the "Golden
Age" of research at the Bronx Veterans
Administration Medical Center, becoming director of the Cancer
Research Division. One story claims that this appointment allowed him to move
his research mice from the trunk of his car, where he had been carrying out
studies, into a fully equipped laboratory. He died at Montefiore Medical Center on
July 19, 1999 of stomach cancer at age
94.
Gross was a major proponent of the possibility that some cancers can be
caused by viruses and began a long search for viral causes of murine leukemia.
In the course of these studies, he isolated the Gross murine leukemia virus strain
as well as the first polyomavirus, so named for
its proclivity to cause cancers in multiple tissue types. Gross murine leukemia virus is
a retrovirus whose counterpart in humans is human T cell
lymphotropic virus I (HTLV-I), while murine polyomavirus is
closely related to the human Merkel cell polyomavirus that
causes most forms of Merkel cell carcinoma.
Thus, Gross identified two critical animal viruses that serve as models for
viruses causing cancer in humans. His encyclopedic textbook Oncogenic
Viruses is still considered a leading source book for early work in
the discovery of viruses causing cancer. Gross died of stomach cancer, a major
cancer caused by infection with the Helicobacter pylori which
he himself researched. A collection of his personal papers are held at the
National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.