Roslyn E. Wallace of Pearl River was the first woman to receive a prestigious Scientific Achievement Award for cancer research. She was the first female director of a laboratory at Lederle Laboratories in Pearl River.
Wallace, 84, died Saturday. (Read obituary here.)

(UPDATE JULY 22: I spoke with Paul Phinney, Orangetown justice and Blauvelt-based lawyer who handled Wallace’s estate matters. He said that Wallace worked not only in cancer research, but in her earlier career at Lederle, in the 1940s, she worked on a vaccine for the polio virus. She also was noted for breeding a special kind of “nude mice” that allowed the growth of human tumors for studying. And, she developed tissue cultures for testing, which could foster a great decrease in animal testing. Her tissue cultures drew the attention of the National Institutes of Health. “She was one of the leaders in her field,” Phinney said. Developing the tissues was key “to allow herself and other scientists to do the experiments that led to the drugs we need today,” Phinney said. He described her as “one of the smartest people around but never flaunted it.”)

“She was very collaborative and helpful to young investigators,” said Dr. Jay Gibbons, assistant vice president of oncology research at Wyeth, whose career in Pearl River overlapped with Wallace for a year or so. “She had a lot of experience with chemotherapeutic drugs … and was well-respected and well-liked.” He stressed that she was “extremely generous in her collaborations.”

Wallace spent 45 years at Lederle as a research scientist, becoming a laboratory director before retiring in 1984. Her educational background was stunning: graduating from the Brenau Women’s College in Georgia 1944, earning a doctorate in biology from Harvard, a Fulbright Award for innovative bone marrow research she completed during her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Wallace shared a patent on a method of accelerating growth of bone marrow stem cells from her Lederle work, and her name is attached to other breakthrough cancer research.

In her retirement, she traveled the globe, including Africa and Southeast Asia.

Interesting woman, doing interesting work. She broke ground in her field, and cancer research benefited from her dedication, so we all did.