The Cancer Detectives - The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women's lives

[LeftInTX]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/cancer-detectives/


The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women’s lives is as unusual and remarkable as the coalition of people who ultimately made it possible: a Greek immigrant, Dr. George Papanicolaou; his intrepid wife, Mary; Japanese-born artist Hashime Murayama; Dr. Helen Dickens, an African American OBGYN in Philadelphia; and an entirely new class of female scientists known as cyto-screeners. But the test was just the beginning. Once the test proved effective, the campaign to make pap smears available to millions of women required nothing short of a total national mobilization. The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the people who fought tirelessly to save women from what was once the number one cancer killer of women.


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This episode was very interesting. How the ubiquitous pap smear test, that we take for granted came to be.

[marybourg]

1. Need a less invasive test, in my opinion.

[LeftInTX]

2. The documentary is very interesting. Papanicalou's wife was his partner. She had over 7,000 pap smears.

That's how he did much of his research. He did it on his wife, but that's all he do at the time and she was very devoted to the pap smear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromachi_Papanikolaou

Throughout her husband's career, Papanikolaou managed both his laboratory affairs and the couple's household affairs. At Cornell, Georgios was observing the ovulatory cycle of guinea pigs, but because he was not a clinician, he lacked access to patients. For 21 years, Mary Papanikolaou volunteered as an experimental subject for her husband, climbing up onto his examination couch every day so that he could sample and smear her cervix.[6] She was quoted as saying: "There was no other option but for me to follow him inside the lab, making his way of life mine" and also decided not to have children so she could continue collaborating with her husband.[7]

Partly through his wife's volunteer efforts, Georgios was able to determine that the monthly changes to guinea pig vaginal discharge that he observed in the lab could also be seen in humans. To provide additional subjects for her husband's research, Mary Papanikolaou also held a party for some female friends, who agreed to have their own cervixes sampled.[8] After one of these women was later diagnosed with cervical cancer, Georgios took her sample back to the lab and, with the help of another cytologist, determined that cancerous cells were indeed visible on the sample. In Georgios' own words: “The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career.”[9]