Doctor Jane Cooke Wright was a trailblazer in the field of cancer research and changed the face of medicine with her contributions to chemotherapy. She is noted for developing the technique of using human tissue culture rather than laboratory mice to test the effects of potential drugs on cancer cells. Her research established the efficacy of methotrexate in treating breast cancer which in turn laid the foundations for treating tumors with chemotherapy.
Jane Cooke Wright was born in 1919 in New York City to Corrine Cooke and Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright. Her father was one of the first African American graduates of Harvard Medical School and had high standards for his daughter. He was the first African American doctor appointed to a staff position at a municipal hospital in New York City and, in 1929, became the city's first African American police surgeon.
Dr. Jane Wright attended medical school at New York Medical College. She earned a full scholarship and graduated with honors at the top of her class as a part of an accelerated three-year program. She then did residencies at various hospitals, including Harlem Hospital where she was chief resident. She joined her father in 1949 at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center, which he founded. There, she did some of her most groundbreaking research and succeeded her father as director when he died in 1952.
Chemotherapy was still mostly experimental during this time and many doctors were hesitant to use it. Dr. Wright and her father focused their research on anti-cancer chemicals and in 1949, they started testing new chemicals for effective anti-cancer properties on human leukemias and other cancers. Determined to make sure her research had an impact in clinical care, she became one of the founding members of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). She was also the only woman in the founding group.
Dr. Wright went on to become an associate professor of surgical research at New York University and director of cancer chemotherapy research at New York University Medical Center. At a time when African American women physicians numbered only a few hundred in the entire country, Dr. Wright was the highest ranked African American woman at a nationally recognized medical institution. She retired in 1987 and died at 93 in 2013.