Born: 16 August 1905, Mexico
Died: 27 November 1976
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
Sarah Stewart was a Mexican-American researcher renowned for her pioneering work in viral oncology research. She was the first to demonstrate the transmission of cancer-causing viruses from one animal to another.
Sarah Elizabeth Stewart was born in Tecalitlán, Jalisco, Mexico, to a Native Mexican mother and an American mining engineer father. The Mexican Revolution in 1911 forced her family to migrate to the United States.
In 1927, she earned a B.Sc. degree in economics from New Mexico State University. She continued her education with a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1930 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Chicago in 1939. Stewart worked as a bacteriology professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine and became the first woman to receive an MD Degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1949.
During her time at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1935 to 1944, she published seven papers on anaerobic bacteria while working on developing a gangrene vaccine during World War II. Stewart later joined the National Cancer Institute in 1951 to explore the link between viruses and cancer.
As a woman in the medical field in the 1940s and 1950s, Stewart faced challenges, including being initially denied the opportunity to work on cancer research at NIH. Despite these obstacles, she persevered and made significant contributions to cancer and virus research.
In 1953, Stewart discovered the polyomavirus, and her collaboration with Bernice Eddy led to the groundbreaking finding that the virus could cause cancer to spread from one animal to another. This discovery transformed the field of viral oncology and earned them recognition in Time magazine in 1959.
Throughout her life, Stewart also identified other viruses associated with cancers, influenced by Jonas Salk’s work on the polio virus vaccine.
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