Janet Rowley noticed something odd about the glowing chromosomes revealed by her microscope. It was the early 1970s, the first years of the so-called " war on cancer ," and she was using a new staining technique to examine cells from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a cancer of the blood that was almost always fatal. The technique highlighted bands within the chromosomes, and she could see an extra piece on the end of chromosome 9. That fragment was nearly the same size as a "missing" chunk of chromosome 22 that other researchers had detected a decade earlier. To Rowley, it looked as if the tips of these two chromosomes had swapped places, or translocated. During the next few years she found two other cases of chromosomal translocation in different forms of leukemia. The finds forever changed the way scientists thought about cancer.
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