Charlotte Friend

Charlotte Friend (March 11, 1921 – January 13, 1987) was an American virologist. She is best known for her discovery of the Friend leukemia virus. She helped to establish the concept of the oncovirus, studied the role of the host immune response in disease development, and helped define modern retrovirology.

Biography

Family Born and raised in New York, she was the youngest daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Morris Friend, a businessman, and Cecilia (Wolpin) Friend, a pharmacist. Friend had three siblings, two older sisters, Priscilla and Leafan, and a younger brother, Morris. When she was three years old, her father died, leaving her mother alone to raise four children during the Great Depression. Her mother made sure all four of her children completed their education, despite living on "Home Relief".

Education and research She graduated from Hunter High School in 1940 and Hunter College in 1944. That same year, she enlisted in the United States Navy. After the war ended she enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at Yale, where she received her PhD in 1950 with a thesis on the effects of sodium salicylate (aspirin) on antigen-antibody reactions During her time at Yale she frequently traveled to New York to consult with Elvin Kabat and Michael Heidelberger, eminent immunologists at Columbia. Charlotte Friend also served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Virus Cancer Program of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention of the National Cancer Institute. Over the years, she served on a number of other advisory committees and on the editorial boards of several cancer and hematology journals. In all, she published 163 papers, 70 of which she wrote by herself or with one other author.

On her sixtieth birthday she was diagnosed with a lymphoma. She was insistent that her diagnosis remain secret, and continued to carry out her duties in her laboratory. Helped set the foundations for the study of retrovirus. Her techniques and characterisation studies allowed the future isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus. Observed the relation between liver cell damage and virus release and elevation of enzyme levels. Furthermore, she detected that increases in serum enzymes are also a feature of some human leukaemia, both still of vital clinical relevance today. Observed the cytodifferentiating effect of DMSO which laid the groundwork for the development of HDAC inhibitors

Prize and Honors 1962 Alfred P. Sloan Award in Cancer Research 1979 Leopold Griffuel Prize 1979 U.S. National Academy of Sciences 1986 Honorary Doctor of Science, Brandeis University

Selected works “Cell-Free Transmission in Adult Swiss Mice of a Disease Having the Character of a Leukemia.” Journal of Experimental Medicine 105 (1957): 307–318 “The Coming of Age of Tumor Virology.” Cancer Research 37 (1977): 1255–1263 “Hemoglobin Synthesis in Murine Virus-induced Leukemic Cells in Vitro: Stimulation of Erythroid Differentiation by Dimethyl Sulfoxide,” with W. Scher, J.G. Holland, and T. Sato. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 68 (1971): 378–382.