Alice Miles Woodruff (November 29, 1900 – November 24, 1985), born Alice Lincoln Miles, was an American virologist. She developed a method for growing fowlpox outside of a live chicken alongside Ernest William Goodpasture.[1][2] Her research greatly facilitated the rapid advancement in the study of viruses.[3]
Alice Lincoln Miles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of Arthur L. Miles and Marie Augusta Putnam Miles. Her father was a dentist.[4][5] She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1922.[6] She obtained a master's degree in 1924 and a PhD in 1925 from Yale University.[7]
Woodruff worked as a research assistant at Vanderbilt University from 1927 until 1931.[7] While working with her husband and Goodpasture, she conducted studies in the "nature, infectivity, and purification of fowl-pox virus, and the character of the changes it induced on experimental infection of fowls," which became the forerunner in the cultivation of viruses.[8]
She married Charles Eugene ("Gene") Woodruff on 25 August 1927. They had three children together, Alice, Mary Jean, and Charles Eugene.[11] She was widowed when her husband died in 1980;[12] she died in Highland, Michigan, in 1985, aged 84 years.
^Podolsky, M. Lawrence (1997). Cures Out of Chaos: How Unexpected Discoveries Led to Breakthroughs in Medicine and Health. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. pp. 238–239. ISBN90-5702-555-8.
^Carmichael, L.E. (2 December 1991). Viral Vaccines Produced in Embryonating Eggs. Quality control of veterinary vaccines in developing countries. Rome. p. 135. ISBN92-5-103398-6.
^Abbott, Susan Woodruff (compiled by) (1963). Woodruff Genealogy: Descendants of Mathew Woodruff of Farmington, Connecticut. New Haven, Connecticut: The Harty Press. p. 593. LCCN63-23034.
