Up for auction a VERY RARE! "Tumor Viruses" Ludwik Gross Hand Signed TLS Dated 1962. 

ES-4663E

 Ludwik

Gross (September 11,

1904 – July 19, 1999) was a Polish-American virologist who discovered two

different tumor viruses, murine leukemia virus and

mouse polyomavirus, capable of

causing cancers in laboratory mice. He

was born on September 11, 1904, in Kraków, Poland to a prominent Jewish family. He studied for a

degree in medicine at the Jagiellonian University.

He escaped from occupied Poland in

1940 soon after the 1939 Nazi invasion and travelled to the United States,

ultimately serving in the United States Armed Forces during World War II. After the war, he joined other scientists

(notably Rosalyn Yalow, recipient

of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology) in the "Golden

Age" of research at the Bronx Veterans

Administration Medical Center, becoming director of the Cancer

Research Division. One story claims that this appointment allowed him to move

his research mice from the trunk of his car, where he had been carrying out

studies, into a fully equipped laboratory. He died at Montefiore Medical Center on

July 19, 1999 of stomach cancer at age

94.

Gross was a major proponent of the possibility that some cancers can be

caused by viruses and began a long search for viral causes of murine leukemia.

In the course of these studies, he isolated the Gross murine leukemia virus strain

as well as the first polyomavirus, so named for

its proclivity to cause cancers in multiple tissue types. Gross murine leukemia virus is

a retrovirus whose counterpart in humans is human T cell

lymphotropic virus I (HTLV-I), while murine polyomavirus is

closely related to the human Merkel cell polyomavirus that

causes most forms of Merkel cell carcinoma.

Thus, Gross identified two critical animal viruses that serve as models for

viruses causing cancer in humans. His encyclopedic textbook Oncogenic

Viruses is still considered a leading source book for early work in

the discovery of viruses causing cancer. Gross died of stomach cancer, a major

cancer caused by infection with the Helicobacter pylori which

he himself researched. A collection of his personal papers are held at the

National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.