Side by side: The work of Elizabeth and James Miller [Metabolism]

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."They were pioneers in what is now the basis of modern molecular carcinogenesis, in which tumors result from mutations in DNA," says Young-Joon Surh, a director in the Tumor Microenvironment Research Center at Seoul National University's College of Pharmacy. Surh was a graduate student with the Millers in the late 1980s.Betty and Jim, as they were known to friends, met while pursuing their doctorates at UW. Jim was a teaching assistant in one of Betty's labs. Betty was engaged at the time, but Jim won her over. They wed in 1942. Soon after graduating, both began work at UW's newly formed McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. "I think they were happy just to be able to have two jobs together," says Fred Guengerich, a biochemist at Vanderbilt University and deputy editor of JBC.The Millers worked side-by-side in the lab and in their shared office. At the time, not much was known about how carcinogens cause cancer. The Millers took a biochemical approach. Norman Drinkwater, a professor of oncology at the...

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