Sarah Stewart Revealed the Missing Link Between Viruses and Cancer

But two years into her doctoral studies, Stewart took an unpaid position at the National Institutes of Health as a research assistant to Ida Bengtson, the first woman scientist to work at the Public Health Service. Alan Rabson, a researcher and later deputy director at NCI, recalled in a 1987 interview that when Stewart finished her stint in Staten Island, “she came back and said now she was ready to prove that cancer [was] caused by viruses. Stewart and Eddy were conservative in their conclusions, maintaining that an “agent” had caused the cancer but avoiding pinpointing it as a cancer-causing virus, which they knew would be controversial.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com