William Edgar Smith ’34

Bill died Feb. 6, 2004. Born in 1914 in Balti-more, he went to the Gilman School there.

At Princeton he majored in biology, and was a member of Arbor Inn. After earning an MD from Johns Hopkins, he was laid up with tuberculosis for two years. He worked in pathology at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. At Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and as associate professor of industrial medicine at NYU, he headed tests on animals for carcinogens in refining petroleum.

Beginning in 1958, Bill served for 25 years as director of the Health Research Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson U. He and his associates reported some of the early experimental evidence for carcinogenicity of asbestos. For lung cancers induced by asbestos in mice, they reported cures by a drug (PCNU) combined with an analog of Vitamin A.

In 1945, Bill married Elizabeth Hamilton. They had three children and divorced in 1962. In 1970 he married Marye Collins. Bill and his family spent summers on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, where he and Marye lived after his 1983 retirement. She predeceased him, as did his sons Austin and Howard, and brother Edgar M. He is survived by a daughter, Rosalie Strickland, and five grandchildren.

The Class of 1934