Chapter 1 | The Cancer Detectives

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: In New York City, the line stretched around the block.

In Philadelphia, women waited for hours outside their local church.

While way out in Wyoming, even the smallest mountain town was ready.

Everywhere, in the year 1958, women were asking for a brand new medical test: a Pap smear.

And nobody had ever seen anything like it.

RACHEL GROSS: In the 1940s and '50s, cervical cancer is killing thousands and thousands of women.

This was definitely a major priority of American healthcare.

The stakes are very high.

NARRATOR: For the first time in history, there was a simple screening test for cancer.

Its rollout and its propaganda were utterly unprecedented.

DEBORAH KERR (archival): Costly cancer deaths, they deprive the world of too many people we love.

Now is the time to strike back at cancer.

NARRATOR: The campaign would require nothing short of a full national mobilization.

DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS: It's so ubiquitous now, that we kind of don't think about the fact that it's not even a hundred years old yet.

When we first hear about a Pap smear, we don't know that it's actually named after a human being.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR (archival): This is the doctor, George N. Papanicolaou, professor emeritus of Cornell Medical College.

NARRATOR: The truth was, George Papanicolaou never set out to revolutionize cancer detection.

And not a single thing about bringing the Pap smear to the people had been simple.

BARRON LERNER: There were lots of barriers and lots of steps to get to where the Pap test really became a life-saving test.

NARRATOR: Behind it all was a coalition as remarkable as it was unusual-- from a Japanese-born artist, to a Black doctor in Philadelphia, to an entirely new class of female scientists.

Yet they all shared a singular goal: to save American women from cancer.

One of the things that surprises me about this story is sometimes when we look at things in retrospect, it seems inevitable that they were going to happen.

When I look at this story, nothing seems inevitable about it.

♪ ♪ (fluid bubbling) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Cornell Medical College, in the year 1914, was home to practically every kind of scientific endeavor imaginable.

Here, one lab studied the bacteria in human saliva.

A floor below, researchers were developing treatments for diabetes by removing the pancreas from dogs.

♪ ♪ Then there was the scientific illustrator who would have 5,000 live mosquitos shipped by mail as "artist supplies."

Amidst it all was a 31-year-old Greek immigrant, a zoologist by the name of George Papanicolaou.

Always at his microscope, Papanicolaou was convinced that cells-- the building blocks of all life-- could tell us more than anyone else had realized.

It was their secrets that he'd been chasing for years.

♪ ♪ (trolley bell ringing) SAM KEAN: When he was in Greece growing up, George Papanicolaou's father wanted George to become a doctor, but George liked science more.

He also was called to help people.

So he wanted to combine both of those doing medical research.

NARRATOR: "It is not my ideal to be wealthy," he'd once written to his parents, but to work to create."

Papanicolaou received his medical degree in 1904, at age 21, then embarked on a PhD in zoology, researching sex determination in the tiny aquatic daphnia, or water flea.

After graduate school, he embarked on a sea voyage with Prince Albert of Monaco, aboard his brand-new oceanographic research vessel, the Hirondelle.

In film footage shot by the prince, Papanicolaou himself can be seen retrieving marine specimens from a large trap.

♪ ♪ KIRSTEN GARDNER: He ends up going on an oceanic voyage to help identify different sea creatures.

He loved to categorize things.

I think it really translates to his later work when he makes his way over to the United States.

(footsteps shuffling) NARRATOR: When he landed in New York City with his young wife, Mary Mavroyeni, in 1913, Papanicolaou was an ambitious scientist on the rise.

But nothing went as planned.

RACHEL GROSS: He spoke German and Greek, but neither of them spoke much English at all.

KEAN: He was taking odd jobs, playing his violin in a restaurant.

(violin playing) He was working as a clerk at a Greek newspaper.

He was a carpet salesman for a bit, and he was supposedly the worst carpet salesman they'd ever had.

He could not close any deal.

He just wasn't a forceful personality in that way.

NARRATOR: Still, George was luckier than most immigrants.

His doctoral work had brought him some renown, and he was offered a job studying reproduction in the laboratory of one Charles Stockard, an anatomist, zoologist, and prominent American eugenicist.

KEAN: George's boss believed in controlling reproduction, controlling who reproduced, with the supposed aim of improving the stock of humankind.

At the time, people thought they knew what good genes and bad genes were.

Good genes were you were white, with healthy young children.

Unfortunately, if you were an immigrant, a person of color, if you had a disease like epilepsy, you were often stigmatized as having bad genes.

GROSS: There was an inkling that if you could control female reproduction, that would give you the tools to create the population you wanted.

NARRATOR: Papanicolaou's new work in Stockard's laboratory involved answering basic questions, still unknown, about female biology.

GARDNER: Dr. Papanicolaou was interested in tracing the cellular changes that happened during the reproductive cycle.

He was very invested in finding that pattern, and when did cells change.

NARRATOR: Papanicolaou threw himself into the work, and, unexpectedly, found a kindred spirit just down the hall.

♪ ♪ KEAN: Hashime Murayama was born in Japan.

He went to the Kyoto Art School.

Then he got a job at Cornell.

He was doing cell illustrations for doctors.

He had a good eye for essentially drawing exactly what he was seeing.

HAZARD: There must have been some degree of kinship between George and Murayama, as both were immigrants to America.

Neither of them would've sounded or maybe looked like their American peers.

NARRATOR: At Cornell, Murayama was as interested in cells as George was, and had even patented a new technique to improve the accuracy of his drawings.