Jane Cooke Wright

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on the thirtieth of November 1919, the daughter of Louis Tompkins Wright — the first Black graduate of Harvard Medical School (1915) and a founding figure of American oncology — and Corinne Cooke. She took her undergraduate degree at Smith College (1942) and her MD at New York Medical College in 1945, third in her class.

She joined her father's Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital in 1949 and succeeded him as its director in 1952, at age thirty-three. She conducted the foundational clinical trials of folic-acid antagonists and antineoplastic agents through the 1950s — research that established the chemotherapeutic basis of modern cancer treatment. Her 1957 paper on combination chemotherapy with methotrexate, vincristine, and 6-mercaptopurine was among the first demonstrations that combination regimens could produce remission in cancers that no single-agent therapy could touch.

She was appointed Associate Dean of New York Medical College in 1967 — the first African American woman to hold an associate dean position at any American medical school. In the same year she was appointed Professor of Surgery and Head of the Cancer Chemotherapy Department, supervising treatment for over four thousand patients annually.

She was a founding member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 1964 — the principal U.S. professional society for clinical cancer researchers — and the only woman among its seven founders. She published over 135 papers in the medical literature and chaired the President's Commission on Cancer in 1964 under Lyndon Johnson.

She died in Guttenberg, New Jersey, on the nineteenth of February 2013, age ninety-three.

She is honored here as the oncologist whose combination-chemotherapy trials established modern cancer treatment.