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Selected: Charlotte Friend, Ph.D.

Biography

Charlotte Friend was a noted microbiologist who made important contributions to the study of cancer. She was born March 11, 1921 in New York City, a city she loved. She received a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1944. She then entered the Navy where she was assigned to help direct a hematology laboratory in California. When she left the Navy in 1946, she began graduate work in microbiology at Yale University. By the time she received her doctorate in 1950, Dr. Friend already had a position in the laboratory of Dr. Alice Moore at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City.

In 1956, Dr. Friend gave a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in which she stated that she had discovered a virus that caused a leukemia-like disorder in newborn mice. She was roundly criticized for bringing up what was considered to be the old canard of viruses causing cancer. Only Dr. Peyton Rous, who had himself made such an announcement years before, spoke in her defense.

But the tide of change on this issue was turning in the face of mounting evidence. Dr. Friend had not been the only researcher whose work suggested this. By the next year, Dr. Friend had published her work in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, under the careful editing of Peyton Rous. Also, Dr. Jacob Furth announced that he had studied Dr. Friend's pathologic material and that leukemia truly had been found to result from the new virus, which quickly became known as the Friend leukemia virus.

Dr. Friend spent the following years investigating different aspects of the virus, as did many other researchers. She worked with various collaborators, often cooperating in international research efforts. Dr. Friend loved to travel and formed many long-term friendships with colleagues in Europe. Her sabbatical years (1963 and 1975) were spent in laboratories in Australia, Israel, France, and Italy. She also attended many international meetings. Dr. Friend was very active in various associations and in outside professional activities such as grant reviewing and serving on editorial boards and advisory councils. In the 1970s, when many associations 'discovered' their female members, Dr. Friend was asked to assume leadership roles in several organizations, serving as chairman of the Gordon Conference (1973); member of the Board of Directors (1973-76) and president (1976) of the American Association for Cancer Research; president of the Harvey Society (1978/79); and president of the New York Academy of Sciences (1978-79).

In 1966, Dr. Friend left Sloan-Kettering to become the first Director of the Center for Experimental Cell Biology and a Professor at the still developing Mount Sinai School of Medicine of The City University of New York. She also was a Professor in the Graduate School of Biological Sciences. At Mount Sinai, she established her own laboratory that in 1967 was endowed as the Mollie B. Roth Laboratory. Peyton Rous was the speaker at the event. Still, there was an unending struggle to find the funding to keep the lab well staffed and well equipped, a situation that got harder as federal funding began to shrink in the 1970s.

The decline in federal funds for basic research led Dr. Friend to write several protest letters to congressmen and others in power. This was a tack that she often took when a subject that mattered to her was threatened. She wrote about many things, including support for Israel, against anti-abortion measures, and in defense of women's rights.

In 1971, Dr. Friend published another landmark paper, this one titled "Hemoglobin synthesis in murine virus-induced leukemic cells in vitro: Stimulation of erythroid differentiation by dimethyl sulfoxide." The co-authors were William Scher, J.G. Holland, and Toru Sato. This paper described research on leukemia cells that had been made to differentiate, or take another step in the maturation process to become erythroid cells, thus stopping their cancer-like multiplication. This work pointed to a whole new area of cancer treatment: If instead of attacking cancer cells with toxic drugs, cancer cells could be targeted to mature, patients would be spared painful, sometimes deadly, but ineffectual treatments. Research continues today by many others in the field trying to make this a reality in cancer care.

Dr. Friend was unusual in having made two major contributions during her career. In all, she published 163 papers, 70 of which she wrote by herself or with one other author. Although diagnosed with lymphoma on her 60th birthday in 1981, she told few of her illness. She continued to go about her work with all the energy she had, writing grants, serving, on committees, and working in the lab. Charlotte Friend died in January, 1987.

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