Janet Rowley, who linked cancer and genetics, dies at 88

Janet Rowley, a medical researcher whose innovative study of chromosomes led to a revolutionary understanding that certain forms of cancer are caused by genetic abnormalities, died Dec. 17 at her home in Chicago. She was 88.

She had ovarian cancer, according to a statement from the University of Chicago, with which she had been affiliated since the 1940s.

Rowley, who was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2009, was a part-time researcher who often worked at her dining room table in the early years of her career. She made her first landmark discoveries in 1972, when she became the first scientist to find evidence that alterations in chromosomes could lead to forms of leukemia and other kinds of cancer.

Some scientists were skeptical of her findings, and the New England Journal of Medicine refused to publish a research paper she had written. But over and over again, Rowley was able to demonstrate a link between genetic markers, or repeated chromosomal patterns, and particular diseases.

Before her groundbreaking studies, most scientists believed that genetic mutations occurred after cancer invaded the body. Rowley established that the opposite was true: that genetic abnormalities were the cause of cancer, not the result of cancer.

Rowley was 15 when she entered an advanced program at the University of Chicago; she received a bachelor's degree in 1944. She received a second bachelor's degree in 1946 and graduated from medical school in 1948. She married Donald Rowley, a fellow medical student who later became a University of Chicago pathology professor.