George Papanicolaou (1883-1962): Discoverer of the Pap Smear

Born in 1883 in Kyme, Greece, George Papanicolaou obtained his medical degree in 1904 from the University of Athens and doctorate in Zoology in 1910 from the University of Munich. He migrated to the USA in 1913 and worked as an assistant at the Department of Anatomy in the Cornell Medical College. There, Papanicolaou examined vaginal smears under his microscope, charted the cyclic ovarian and uterine changes every day and harvested the oocytes at the appropriate time. He published his research on the cytologic patterns in guinea pigs in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1917. Eventually, he began taking similar scrapings from women and noticing malignant cells in smears taken from women with cancer. In 1928, his presentation on the topic at the Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, was greeted with skepticism as researchers felt that a biopsy and tissue examination was the only way to detect the disease. In 1939, he collaborated on a clinical study with Herbert F. Traut, MD, a gynecologic pathologist at Cornell, to validate the diagnostic potential of the vaginal smear and published their landmark paper in 1943 titled "Diagnosis of uterine cancer by the vaginal smear." In 1954, Papanicolaou published the "Atlas of Exfoliative Cytology." George Nicholas Papanicolaou was a pioneer in cytopathology and creator of the Papanicolaou test or Pap smear. This revolutionized the early detection of cervical cancer and led to a 70% reduction in cervical cancer deaths.