RSV: The First Specimens

A hen's leg with osteochondrosarcoma, circa 1912

© Jason varney | Varneyphoto.com

It was not odd that an upstate New York farmer would bring a sick Plymouth Rock hen to Peyton Rous at the Rockefeller Institute in 1909, nor that Rous would be interested in the case. Two years earlier, Hungarian veterinarian Joseph Marek had identified the costly, highly transmissible visceral leucosis of the chicken which now bears his name, and a pair of Danish researchers had identified the viral etiology of a chicken leukemia in 1908. Might the chicken hold a revelation about viral-inducing tumors in humans? Rous wondered, even as conventional medical wisdom strongly rejected that possibility.

In Rous's first line of experiments, he transplanted bits of the original hen's breast tumor to other purebred Plymouth Rocks and mixed-bred chickens, producing tumors in the purebred stock alone--which suggested an inherited susceptibility (J Exp Med, 12:696-705, 1910). Subsequently, he demonstrated transmission of malignant new growth from a cell-free filtrate, and how the same virus caused tumors in cartilage and the gizzard. Shown in the photograph is a hen's leg with osteochondrosarcoma, which Rous reported in 1912 (J Am Med Assoc, 59;1793, 1912).

In 1963, Rous presented five preserved specimens to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, where they are now in the collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Three years later, he won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the first tumor-inducing virus. Other investigators built on the find and delved deeper. David Baltimore and Howard Temin found in Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV) a strange enzyme--reverse transcriptase--that re-revolutionized understanding of how RNA tumor viruses interact with the DNA of a cell. In his 1989 Nobel lecture, Harold Varmus said that "Rous's virus remains the only retrovirus that could have satisfied the genetic and biochemical criteria for the work we accomplished in the era that preceded molecular cloning."