Cancer has been with us for millions of years - we've found dinosaur bones, hundreds of millions years old, with clear evidence of bone cancer. Today, the second most common cancer that kills women in Western society is cancer of the cervix (second only to cancer of the breast).

Luckily, we have the famous Pap Smear - an excellent way to find cancer of the cervix before it digs in locally and/or spreads throughout the body. The Pap Smear is named after a certain Dr. Papanicolaou - who did a Pap Smear on his wife virtually every day for 20 years.

George Nikolas Papanicolaou was born in 1883 in Kymi, a small town overlooking the Aegean Sea on the Island of Euboea in Greece. His father, Nikolas Papanicolaou was both the Major of Kymi and a medical doctor. His older brother, Naso, had studied law, so his father convinced George to continue in the family medical tradition. So George studied medicine, and did well, graduating with a degree in honours in 1904.

He then spent two years as a medical doctor in the Greek Army. He was not particularly interested in a clinical career in medicine, so he went to Germany and enrolled as a doctoral student in biology. He studied what determined the sex, and what were the sex differences, in the water flea. He again did well, and by 1910 had received his Doctorate and returned to Greece.

On a ferry boat journey to Athens, he met Andromache Mavroyeni. She was clever and well educated, could speak French and play the piano, and had a great personality - so they married. During the Balkan War of 1912 George re-entered the army, where he met many Greeks who had gone to America and had returned to fight in the war. They convinced him to emigrate to the USA, where he could make his dreams come true.

In October 1913, George and Andromache arrived in New York with $250, no friends, nowhere to stay and not a word of English. They both started working at Gimbels Department store - George sold rugs, while Adromache sewed buttons for $5 per week. But he wanted more, and within a year, both George and Andromache were working at Cornell University, with Adromache being an unpaid assistant to her husband. This was because the University had rules that a married couple could not be employed. They were to work together for the next 47 years.

The department where he worked was researching the effects of alcohol on guinea pigs and their babies. George was still interested in Sex Determination and Differentiation, so he got permission to work with a few spare female guinea pigs. For his particular research, he needed guinea pig eggs just before ovulation (ie, just before the ovary released its eggs). But nobody knew how to tell when a guinea pig was ovulating. One morning he woke up with a Cosmic Flash, which he wrote down: "The females of all higher animals have a periodic vaginal discharge: so lower animals such as these rodents, should also have one, but one probably too scanty to be evidenced externally."

On his way to work, he bought a small nasal speculum to open up and examine the vagina of his guinea pigs. He collected some vaginal cells, and spread, or smeared out, the vaginal debris and cells on a glass slide and looked at it under a microscope. (This is why it's called a Pap SMEAR.) Thanks to his knowledge of cells (gained by working with the water flea for many years) he could see that these vaginal cells were at different stages through their life cycle.

That very evening, he somehow convinced his incredibly obliging (and scientifically curious and very brave) wife, Adromache, to consent to the very first Papanicolaou Smear. Again, he saw patterns in her vaginal cells that were similar to the patterns he had seen in the vaginal cells of the guinea pig that morning.

Luckily for science, and for millions of women, his wife consented to being a long-term volunteer. He did a Pap Smear every day - and the days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. Thankfully, Andromache had uncomplicated and regular cycles. He observed the normal changes in the cells in different parts of the vagina through one menstrual cycle - and then from one menstrual cycle to the next.

But the Pap Smear comes into its own when you find an abnormality in the cells. Dr. Pap's work with his wife, Andromache, was only the beginning of what was to be a long journey before his Pap Smear was accepted, and I'll talk about that, next time…

Mary Papanicolaou