When Janet Rowley was accepted into the University of Chicago's medical school in 1944, the quota for women was already filled three in a class of 65.

So she had to wait a year.

Dr. Rowley made up for that early setback by becoming an internationally known scientist whose research in the 1970s redefined cancer as a genetic disease and led to a paradigm shift in how it is studied and treated.

An advisor to presidents and recipient of her nation's highest honors, Rowley achieved breakthroughs that prolonged the lives of countless cancer patients. She died Tuesday at age 88 at her home in the Chicago suburb of Hyde Park from complications of ovarian cancer.

"She was a pioneer in the field because, at that time, there was a big divide between what people thought caused cancer," said Dr. Funmi Olopade, director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics at the University of Chicago. "She was able to show that genetic changes were defining specific types of cancers, and it was these genetic abnormalities that were really the trigger to explaining why cancer behaved the way it behaved."

Rowley graduated from medical school in 1948 at age 23. The next day she married fellow medical student Donald Rowley, who became a professor of pathology at the university. For many years while raising four sons, Rowley worked three days a week, including at a Chicago clinic for children with Down syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by an extra chromosome.

Her interest in chromosomes continued in the 1960s, when she traveled to Oxford University to learn new ways to analyze them.

Back home, a University of Chicago colleague gave Rowley some laboratory space, a microscope and a salary of $5,000 a year and encouraged her to study the chromosomes of leukemia patients.

Rowley's pivotal discovery came during one of her "off days" in 1972, while poring through images of chromosomes that she had spread out on the family dinner table.

At the time, scientists were befuddled by the relationship between genes and cancer, unsure why patients with a particular leukemia displayed one abnormally short chromosome a threadlike structure that carries genetic information.

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Janet Rowley dies at 88; scientist pinpointed genetic cause of leukemia

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