Charlotte Friend
| Charlotte Friend | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | March 11, 1921 New York City, New York |
| Died | January 13, 1987 (aged 65) New York, New York |
| Residence | New York, New York |
| Nationality | U.S. |
| Alma mater | Hunter College, Yale |
| Known for | Discovery of the Friend Leukemia Virus and Friend erythroleukemia cells, her research is still widely used today. It has become especially important in the field of HIV/AIDS research following her death. |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Virology |
| Institutions | New York University, Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, Icahn School of Medicine |
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.
Born and raised in New York, she was the youngest daughter of Russian Jewish emigrants, Morris Friend, a businessman, and Cecilia (Wolpin) Friend, a pharmacist. Friend had three siblings, consisting of two older sisters and a younger brother. When she was three years old, her father died, leaving her mother alone to raise four kids during the Great Depression. Her mother made sure all four of her kids would be able to finish their education, despite living on "Home Relief".
She graduated from Hunter High School in 1940 and Hunter College in 1944. The same year, she enlisted in the United States Navy. As a lieutenant junior grade she worked in the hematology laboratory at U.S. Naval Hospital Shoemaker, California. 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, imminent immunologists at Columbia. As a post-doc she worked in the Sloan-Kettering Institute under the direction of Cornelius P. Rhoads. While at Sloan-Kettering, she met Cecily Cannan Selby, who had recently gotten her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both of them were interested in cell structure. Once, when looking through an unused electron microscope at the university, the two decided to look at fine structures within the cells of the Ehrlich ascites carcinoma, a commonly used model for cancer research. What they found were structures in the cytoplasm of the cells which resembled those found in virus-infested cells. It was this incident that sparked Friend's interest in the possibility of cancer being caused by viruses, which became a main focus of her research. In 1966 she accepted a position as Professor and Director of the Center for Experimental Cell Biology at The Mount Sinai Hospital.
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