Herbert Traut
(April 3, 1894 - January 28, 1963)
Born in the United States
Year of Discovery: 1941

Google Doodle Honoring the Pap Smear

Joined Papanikolaou to Prove the Pap Smear Predicts Cervical Cancer and Can Prevent Cancer

In 1931, Herbert Traut met George Papanikolaou when he joined the faculty of the Cornell University Medical College. The collaboration of these two men led to a major breakthrough in the early detection of uterine and cervical cancer, cutting its death rate drastically.

When they met, George Papanikolaou had been working on a method of collecting and interpreting cervical cells from women, in an effort to detect cancer, a test that became known as the "pap smear." In 1928 he had presented his findings at a medical conference in Michigan, but was met with scepticism. About the same time a Romanian, Aurel Babes developed a different test that also looked at cervical cells.  But neither test gained traction in the real world. At the time, many physicians and scientists thought the idea of examining scraped dead cells for cancer was ridiculous and believed a biopsy was the only way to accurately detect it.

Herbert Traut thought Papanikolaou's ideas were good and the two formed a team in 1940.  They began training medical technologists to distinguish healthy from unhealthy cells on a microscope slide after a vaginal smear. If the cells changed from flat to fat, they indicated cancer. Following the same women for two years, they were thrilled to find the smear detected some cancer cases that were still in the early stages - so early they were not found in normal biopsies! This meant the cancer could be found early enough to cure. Papanikolaou and Traut published their groundbreaking findings in a 1943 monograph titled, Diagnosis of uterine cancer by the vaginal smear.  It still took decades more to change the medical establishment and make the test routine.  When large studies eventually occurred, routine pap smears were shown to cut cervical cancer deaths by a third.