ABSTRACT
In 1943, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a long article on cancer written by a well-known pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Peyton Rous's article proposed a new viral explanation of cancer:
To account for the worldwide distribution of tumors … it has been necessary to suppose that the body carries resident viruses just as it does resident bacteria, indigenous viruses, as they have been termed [.] … They would give no sign of their presence in most instances and would in due course be passed on to the young. But if a provocative carcinogen happened to work on the cells with which such a virus was associated, thus altering its milieu, it might undergo variation and, taking a hand in cell affairs for the first time, give rise to a tumor. (Rous, 1943, p. 580)
