I was only interested in cervical cancer. I picked up on papillomaviruses by looking into the literature from the 1930s: researchers such as Richard Shope and Peyton Rous had investigated lentil-like structures on wild US cottontail rabbits. They found that taking extracts from these lesions and infecting domestic rabbits produced similar warts that converted gradually to malignant tumours. I also found a few anecdotal reports that genital warts in humans occasionally converted into malignant tumours. These findings triggered the idea that there may be an agent in the genital lesions that could also cause cervical cancer; perhaps this agent has a different cancer-causing potential in the cervical mucosa than in the external genital skin.
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