In 1932, virologist Richard E. Shope became aware of stories of wild cottontails stricken with a disease that resulted in unusual growths on the animals that, he wrote, were “referred to popularly as ‘horned’ or ‘warty’ rabbits.” Like Richard Shope, fellow virologist Ludwik Gross was a proponent of the then-controversial theory that some cancers are caused by viruses. In his 1961 book Oncogenic Viruses (the first history of tumor virology), Gross included the following story, told in Shope’s own words, reprinted with Shope’s permission from his unpublished notes:
The father of the wife of one of our staff members was visiting his daughter in Princeton shortly after I had started my experiments with the rabbit fibroma. This old gentleman was from Iowa and was quite a hunter out there. Because of this, his daughter had asked me if I would show her father the tumor that I had gotten from ...
