In the late 1940s and early '50s, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) changed the course of cancer research. In a series of six papers published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) (1–6), James and Elizabeth Miller showed that cancer-causing chemicals, known as carcinogens, had to be metabolized and undergo enzymatic transformation in order to cause cancer. The first evidence that metabolized carcinogens can modify tissue components, such as nucleic acids and proteins, came from this work.
