Cornelius P. Rhoads

Cornelius P. Rhoads

Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads (June 9, 1898–August 13, 1959) was an American pathologist and oncologist, the first director of the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. He appeared on the cover of the June 27, 1949 issue of Time magazine under the title "Cancer Fighter."

This was not his first appearance in Time. In the early 1930s, Dr. Rhoads became noted for writing a personal letter that disparaged Puerto Ricans and claimed to have performed unethical experiments on them. Confronted when the letter was discovered and made public, Rhoads denied the experiments, saying he had written his comments in anger. He also subsequently claimed that he had meant his comments as a joke, and not literally. Puerto Rican nationalists, starting with Pedro Albizu Campos in 1933, have maintained that Rhoads was serious in his "confession."

The allegations were revisited in 2002, when the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), who had previously established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award in honor of major contributions by the researcher during his career, commissioned a new investigation. The investigation was led by Jay Katz, emeritus professor of law, medicine, and psychiatry at Yale Law School, and a specialist in medical ethics and human experimentation. He concluded that "although there was no evidence that Rhoads killed patients or transplanted cancer cells, the letter itself was sufficiently repehensible to warrant removing his name from the prize." AACR concurred and renamed the award.