Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads was an American pathologist, oncologist, and hospital administrator.
Background
Cornelius Packard Rhoads was born on June 20, 1898 in Springfield, Massachussets, the son of George Holmes Rhoads, a physician, and Harriet Barney. He used the initials C. P. and was throughout his life called "Dusty" by friends and associates.
Education
After early education in Springfield, Rhoads attended Bowdoin College and received his B. A. in 1920. In 1924 he was awarded his M. D. degree by Harvard Medical School.
Career
During the next year as a surgical intern at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis; the following year was spent in recovery and research at the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York. There he developed a lasting interest in and devotion to laboratory medicine.
In 1926 he became an instructor in pathology at Harvard and an assistant pathologist at Boston City Hospital. In 1928 he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, where he served as associate and associate member of the institute and pathologist of its hospital. From 1933 to 1939 he was in charge of the institute's study of hematologic disorders.
On January 1, 1940, Rhoads succeeded James Ewing as director of Memorial Hospital for Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York. His service as director was soon interrupted by the war; he became chief of the Medical Division of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, with the rank of colonel. His later work on the development of the nitrogen mustard used in chemical warfare into a chemotherapeutic agent stemmed from his wartime service. During the war he also came to realize the value of bringing many different disciplines of research to bear on a single problem, and he conceived the idea of an institute at which a concentrated attack could be made on cancer.
He dreamed of an approach to the cancer problem in which fundamental differences between cancer cells and normal cells and differences in the endocrine metabolism of normal and cancer-bearing individuals would be sought, in which empirical attempts would be made to find drugs that would selectively damage the cancer cells without damaging vital normal cells, and in which biochemical and animal studies could be immediately translated into practical application in the patient.
At the end of the war, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. , provided the support that made the dream possible, and in 1948 the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research was opened. Rhoads was director of the institute from its inception until his death. He remained director of Memorial Hospital until 1950 and was director of Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases from 1950 to 1952, when he became scientific director of the center.
He served as professor of pathology at Cornell University Medical College from 1940 to 1952, when the Sloan-Kettering Division of Cornell University Medical College was created; at that time, he became professor of pathology in the division's Department of Biology and Growth.
Rhoads's contributions are recorded in more than 300 scientific publications. The first, written in 1926 with Dr. Fred Stewart, his longtime friend and associate, was concerned with the turberculin reaction, probably stemming from the Trudeau period. Early studies with Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute resulted in a number of reports on aspects of immunity in poliomyelitis.
His first papers on cancer (1928) concerned osteoblastomas and studies with leukemic blood. Nearly all his later publications related to various aspects of cancer, including many on the chemotherapy of cancer, in which he had a consuming interest and an abounding faith.
In 1948 the New York Cancer Committee awarded Rhoads the Clement Cleveland Medal, and in 1955 he received the American Cancer Society Award. For his wartime activities he was awarded the Legion of Merit.
In 1956 he was a recipient of the Walker Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons and shortly before his death was made a chevalier of France's Légion d' Honneur. He died in Stonington, Connecticut The library at the Walker Laboratory of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in Rye, New York, was officially designated the C. P. Rhoads Memorial Library in January 1961.