Huggins, Charles Brenton (1901-1997), was a Canadian-born American surgeon who discovered the role played by hormones in the growth of certain forms of cancer. For his discovery, he shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Francis Peyton Rous, an American cancer researcher.
Huggins focused on two common cancers, breast cancer, which strikes mainly women, and prostate cancer, which strikes only men. Prostate cancer affects the prostate gland, a walnut-sized internal organ of the male reproductive system. Huggins found that breast cancer cells need female hormones, and prostate cancer cells need male hormones, to survive and grow. He developed treatments that extended the lives of cancer patients by reducing the level of hormones in their body. For example, he treated breast cancer patients by removing the ovaries, and prostate cancer patients by removing the testicles or administering female hormones. He also found that he could slow the growth of both types of cancer by removing the adrenal glands, hormone-producing glands above the kidneys.
Huggins was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He graduated from Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1920. That same year, he moved to the United States to attend Harvard Medical School, earning both an M.A. degree and an M.D. degree in 1924. He did his internship at the University of Michigan Hospital and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Medical School as an instructor in surgery in 1927. He became a U.S. citizen in 1933 and gained the rank of professor at the University of Chicago in 1936. From 1951 to 1969, he directed the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research at the university. Huggins returned to Canada to serve as chancellor of Acadia University from 1972 to 1979 and then retired in Chicago.
