Charlotte Friend

Charlotte Friend (March 11, 1921 – January 13, 1987) was an American virologist.

She is best known for her discovery of the Friend leukemia Virus.

She helped to establish the concept of the oncovirus, studied the role of the host immune response in disease development, and helped define modern retrovirology.

Born and raised in New York, she was the youngest daughter of Russian Jewish emigrants, Morris Friend, a businessman, and Cecilia (Wolpin) Friend, a pharmacist.

Friend had three siblings, consisting of two older sisters, Priscilla and Leafan, and a younger brother, Morris.

When she was three years old, her father died, leaving her mother alone to raise four kids during the Great Depression.

Her mother made sure all four of her kids would be able to finish their education, despite living on "Home Relief".

She graduated from Hunter High School in 1940 and Hunter College in 1944.

The same year, she enlisted in the United States Navy.

As a lieutenant junior grade she worked in the hematology laboratory at U.S. Naval Hospital Shoemaker, California.

After the war ended she enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at Yale, where she received her PhD in 1950 with a thesis on the effects of sodium salicylate (aspirin) on antigen-antibody reactions During her time at Yale she frequently traveled to New York to consult with Elvin Kabat and Michael Heidelberger, imminent immunologists at Columbia.

As a post-doc she worked in the Sloan-Kettering Institute under the direction of Cornelius P. Rhoads.

While at Sloan-Kettering, she met Cecily Cannan Selby, who had recently gotten her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Both of them were interested in cell structure.

Once, when looking through an unused electron microscope at the university, the two decided to look at fine structures within the cells of the Ehrlich ascites carcinoma, a commonly used model for cancer research.

What they found were structures in the cytoplasm of the cells which resembled those found in Virus-infested cells.

It was this incident that sparked Friend's interest in the possibility of cancer being caused by viruses, which became a main focus of her research.

In 1966 she accepted a position as professor and director of the Center for Experimental Cell Biology at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

During her lifetime she was president of the Harvey Society, the American Association for Cancer Research and the New York Academy of Sciences and was the first woman to do so.

Charlotte Friend also served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Virus Cancer Program of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention of the National Cancer Institute.

Over the years, she served on a number of other advisory committees and on the editorial boards of several cancer and hematology journals.

In all, she published 163 papers, 70 of which she wrote by herself or with one other author.

On her sixtieth birthday she was diagnosed with a lymphoma.

She was insistent that her diagnosis remain secret, and continued to carry out her duties in her laboratory.

She died at the age of 65.