GEORGIOS N. PAPANICOLAOU

Georgios Papanicolaou (1883-1962). Georgios Papanicolaou was a prominent Greek physician and researcher, best known as the eponymous inventor of the “Pap test” for the early detection of cervical cancer. Born in Kymi on the isle of Euboea, Papanicolaou graduated from the School of Medicine at the University of Athens in 1904. He then enrolled in the Institute for Experimental Biology at the University of Munich, from where he earned a PhD in 1910. After serving as an army doctor during the Balkan wars, he left in 1913 for the United States, where he first worked at the Department of Pathology and Bacteriology of New York Hospital. A year later, he became a researcher at the Department of Anatomy of Cornell Medical College, where he would pursue his research for the next forty-seven years and attain full professor status. Georgios Papanicolaou was the epitome of a dedicated scientist, as well as a man of culture and ethics. As he once wrote to his parents, “My ideal is not to become rich or to live happily, but rather to lead a life of work and action, create and accomplish something worthy of a moral and strong person”.