Alice Miles Woodruff

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 Miles Woodruff
Alice Lincoln Miles, from the 1922 Mount Holyoke College yearbook
Born	November 29, 1900 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died	November 24, 1985 Highland Township, Michigan
Occupation	Virologist
Spouse	Charles Eugene Woodruff ​ ​ (m. 1927)​
Children	Alice, Mary Jean, Charles Eugene
Academic background
Alma mater	Mount Holyoke College Yale University (MS, PhD)
Academic work
Institutions	Vanderbilt University
Main interests	Viruses
Notable works	egg culture virology

Early life and education

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]

Career

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]

Woodruff was a regional chair of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in her later years.^[9][10]

Personal life

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.

Bibliography

• Woodruff, Alice Miles; Goodpasture, Ernest W. (May 1931). "The Susceptibility of the Chorio-Allantoic Membrane of Chick Embryos to Infection with the Fowl-Pox Virus". American Journal of Pathology. 7 (3): 209–222. PMC 2062632. PMID 19969963.