Ludwik Gross (September 11, 1904 – July 19, 1999) was a

Polish-American Polish Americans ( pl, Polonia amerykańska) are Americans who either have total or partial Poles, Polish ancestry, or are citizens of the Republic of Poland. There are an estimated 9.15 million self-identified Polish Americans, representing abou ...

virologist who discovered two different

tumor viruses An oncovirus or oncogenic virus is a virus that can cause cancer. This term originated from studies of acutely transforming retroviruses in the 1950–60s, when the term "oncornaviruses" was used to denote their RNA virus origin. With the letter ...

—

murine leukemia virus The murine leukemia viruses (MLVs or MuLVs) are retroviruses named for their ability to cause cancer in murine (mouse) hosts. Some MLVs may infect other vertebrates. MLVs include both exogenous and endogenous viruses. Replicating MLVs have a pos ...

and mouse

polyomavirus ''Polyomaviridae'' is a family of viruses whose natural hosts are primarily mammals and birds. As of 2020, there are six recognized genera and 117 species, five of which are unassigned to a genus. 14 species are known to infect humans, while othe ...

—capable of causing cancers in laboratory mice.

Biography

Gross was born on September 11, 1904 in

Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...

, Poland to a prominent Jewish family. He studied for a degree in medicine at the

Jagiellonian University The Jagiellonian University (Polish: ''Uniwersytet Jagielloński'', UJ) is a public research university in Kraków, Poland. Founded in 1364 by King Casimir III the Great, it is the oldest university in Poland and the 13th oldest university in ...

. He escaped from

occupied Poland ' (Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 October 2 ...

in 1940 soon after the 1939 Nazi invasion and travelled to the United States, ultimately serving in the

United States Armed Forces The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. After the war, he joined other scientists (notably

Rosalyn Yalow Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011) was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay ...

, 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. Gross was also a medical journalist and frequent letter writer to The New York Times. In one letter, he opposed fluoridation of the water supply to prevent tooth decay, calling fluoride “an insidious poison, harmful, toxic and cumulative in its effect, even when ingested in minimal amounts.” He never changed his view. He died at

Montefiore Medical Center Montefiore Medical Center is a premier academic medical center and the primary teaching hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York City. Its main campus, the Henry and Lucy Moses Division, is located in the Norwoo ...

on July 19, 1999 of

stomach cancer Stomach cancer, also known as gastric cancer, is a cancer that develops from the lining of the stomach. Most cases of stomach cancers are gastric carcinomas, which can be divided into a number of subtypes, including gastric adenocarcinomas. Lymph ...

at age 94.

Research work

Gross was a major proponent of the possibility that some cancers could 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

'' strain, as well as the first

(so named for its proclivity to cause cancers in multiple tissue types). Gross murine leukemia virus is a

retrovirus A retrovirus is a type of virus that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. Once inside the host cell's cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase ...

whose human counterpart is T cell lymphotropic virus I, while murine polyomavirus is closely related to the human

Merkel cell polyomavirus Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV or MCPyV) was first described in January 2008 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the first example of a human viral pathogen discovered using unbiased metagenomic next-generation sequencing with a technique called d ...

that causes most forms of

Merkel cell carcinoma Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a rare and aggressive skin cancer occurring in about 3 people per 1,000,000 members of the population. It is also known as cutaneous APUDoma, Primary tumor, primary neuroendocrine tumor, neuroendocrine carcinoma of ...

. 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 cancer-causing viruses. Gross died of stomach cancer, a major cancer caused by infection with the

Helicobacter pylori ''Helicobacter pylori'', previously known as ''Campylobacter pylori'', is a gram-negative, microaerophilic, spiral (helical) bacterium usually found in the stomach. Its helical shape (from which the genus name, helicobacter, derives) is though ...

, which he himself researched. A collection of his personal papers is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

Scientific awards

* R.R. de Villiers Foundation (Leukemia Society) Award for Leukemia Research (1953) * Walker Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London (1961) * Pasteur Silver Medal of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1962) * WHO United Nations Prize for Cancer Research (1962) * Bertner Foundation Award (1963) *

Special Virus Cancer Program The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. T ...

Award of the National Cancer Institute (1972) *

Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research The Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research is one of the prizes awarded by the Lasker Foundation for a fundamental discovery that opens up a new area of biomedical science. The award frequently precedes a Nobel Prize in Medicine; almost 5 ...

(1974) *

William B. Coley Award The William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology is presented annually by the Cancer Research Institute, to scientists who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of basic and tumor immunology and whose w ...

(1975) * Principal 1978 Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaeder Prize in Frankfurt * Griffuel Prize in Paris (1978) * Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1973) * French Legion of Honor (1977)

References

External links

* NIH Paper Collection of Ludwik Gros

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gross, Ludwik 1904 births 1999 deaths Jagiellonian University alumni Polish emigrants to the United States American people of Polish-Jewish descent American virologists Deaths from stomach cancer Leukemia Recipients of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research 20th-century Polish physicians