Janet Rowley died at age 88 in Chicago, Illinois, having established cancer as a genetic disease through her discovery of chromosomal translocations.
Janet Davison Rowley died on December 17, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois, at the age of 88, following complications from ovarian cancer.
At the time of her death, Rowley was still an active faculty member at the University of Chicago, where she had spent virtually her entire career since her early training there. Her death was met with tributes from across the scientific and medical communities, recognizing her as one of the most influential cancer researchers of the twentieth century.
Rowley's discoveries—that specific, recurring chromosomal translocations directly cause cancers such as chronic myelogenous leukemia and acute myelogenous leukemia—had fundamentally transformed oncology from a field focused on describing tumors to one grounded in molecular and genetic mechanisms. Her identification of the translocation underlying the Philadelphia chromosome directly enabled the development of imatinib (Gleevec), one of the first successful targeted cancer therapies, which transformed CML from a fatal diagnosis into a chronic, manageable condition.
She was survived by her husband Donald Rowley, a pathologist and fellow University of Chicago faculty member (who died shortly after her in 2014), and their four sons. Her legacy endures through the countless cancer patients who have benefited from targeted therapies rooted in her discoveries, and through the field of cancer cytogenetics that she essentially founded.