George Papanicolaou

Georgios Papanikolaou, known in the United States as George Papanicolaou, was a Greek physician, zoologist and microscopist who completed his medical training in Greece and Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1913 to join the faculty of Cornell Medical College. In 1928 he first reported that cervical cancer cells could be detected in vaginal smears examined under a microscope, work that developed into the Pap smear, a screening test that transformed early detection of cervical cancer, though the method did not gain wide clinical recognition until the 1940s. In 1961 he moved to Miami to establish and direct the Papanicolaou Cancer Research Institute at the University of Miami, and he received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1950, despite five Nobel Prize nominations that never resulted in the award.