In 1950 the American government honoured Dr George N. Papanicolaou with the highest prize, the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award.
George Papanicolaou was honoured with the Lasker Award for his exceptional contributionto cancer related research, since cancer is one of the more important causes of death and disability.
His discovery is related to the detection,- among the cells that exfoliate from the surface of the cervix-, of those that reveal the characteristic changes met in particular biological procedures, such as neoplasms.
Exfoliative cytology has been widely approved as the method that provides a relatively fast, easy and precise test for the diagnosis of certain kinds of cancer.
