James A. Miller

James A. Miller ( 1915 in Dormont , near Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † December 24, 2000 ) was an American biochemist , known for fundamental research on the chemical mechanism of carcinogenesis , where he worked closely with his wife Elizabeth C. Miller worked together.

Miller was left to fend for himself at an early age, as his mother died in 1929 and the father (responsible for newspaper distribution at Pittsburgh Press) became seriously ill. In 1933 he graduated from high school during the Great Depression . He started out on the chemistry faculty at the University of Pittsburgh through a youth employment program , where he was able to study chemistry. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1939, he continued his studies with a scholarship at the University of Wisconsin – Madison . In 1941 he made his master's degree in biochemistry and in 1943 he received his doctorate. In 1940 he met Elizabeth Miller, who was also in the biochemistry laboratory, and in 1942 they were married. Both began their research on chemical carcinogens at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research. He retired in the 1980s.

In 1947, the Millers discovered that an azo dye could cause cancer by binding to proteins in the liver of rats, as did Yoshida Tomizō in Japan in the 1930s . In 1949 they discovered that the carcinogenic effect can also only be generated by chemical conversion processes in the metabolism, they demonstrated the role of the interaction with DNA as a cause of cancer development and subsequently examined numerous substances for carcinogenicity.

In 1980 he and Elizabeth Miller received the Charles S. Mott Prize for cancer research and both received numerous other prizes, such as the Papanicolaou Prize in 1975 and the first Founders Award of the Chemical Institute of Toxicology in 1978 and the Gairdner Foundation International Award . From 1978 to 1981 he was co-editor of Cancer Research. In 1978 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1981 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Miller had two daughters from his marriage to Elizabeth Miller, one of whom was an artist and the other a professor of botany. In 1988 he married a second time after Elizabeth Miller's death.

Web links

• Biography of James and Elizabeth Miller from World of Chemistry