Georgios Papanikolaou

Georgios Papanikolaou, also written George Papanicolaou, was a Greek physician, zoologist and microscopist who became a pioneer of cytopathology and early cancer detection. He was born in Kymi, Greece, in 1883, studied medicine in Athens and zoology in Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1913, where he worked at New York Hospital and Cornell Medical College. In 1928 he reported that uterine cancer cells could be detected in vaginal smears, a technique that became the Papanicolaou test, or Pap smear, used worldwide to screen for cervical cancer. His 1942 book with Herbert Traut and his 1954 Atlas of Exfoliative Cytology laid the foundation of cytopathology as a specialty. He received the Lasker Award in 1950 and died in Miami in 1962.