These photos represent the oncologists of Fox Chase Cancer Center’s “Murderers’ Row.”
Jonathan Chernoff, director and Stanley P. Reimann Chair in Oncology Research at Fox Chase Comprehensive Cancer Center commemorated this band of scientists in an editorial for the Cancer History Project. Chernoff writes:
“Early giants included the structural biologist Lindo Patterson as well as the developmental biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas King. Patterson developed analytic tools for protein structure determination that are still used today. He (and later his postdoctoral fellow, Jenny Glusker) held an NIH grant entitled “The Structure of Proteins” that was continuously funded for more than 50 years, likely a record. Briggs and King used nuclear transfer to create the world’s first cloned animals many decades before Dolly the sheep, establishing key principles in developmental biology.
These notables were followed by a second wave of hires, brought on mostly between 1960 and 1970: Bea Mintz, Barry Blumberg, Ernie Rose, David Hungerford, Al Knudson, Bob Perry, Paul Engstrom, and Jenny Glusker. Among them, these scientists would eventually win two Nobel Prizes, the Lasker Award, the Kyoto Prize, two John Scott Awards, the GM Cancer Research Prize, the Szent-Györgyi Prize, the William Proctor Prize, and countless other prestigious awards. More importantly, they fundamentally changed the way we think about cancer.
At seminars, these folks tended to sit together, usually in the front row, and they presented a formidable front for anyone giving a talk or leading a faculty seminar.”
