Monroe E. Wall, 85; Helped Discover Two Cancer-Fighting Drugs

Monroe E. Wall, 85, a biochemist who helped discover two drugs that fight cancer--Taxol and camptothecin, died of heart and kidney failure July 6 at a hospital in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The son of a Russian Jewish tailor, Wall was born in Newark, N.J. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees all from Rutgers University.

For two decades, he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture before joining the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina in the early 1960s.

It was there that Wall and colleague Mansukh Wani discovered plant compounds that shrink cancerous tumors. One of their discoveries, Taxol, has been used effectively to treat ovarian, breast and lung cancers. It also has been effective in battling a cancer associated with the AIDS virus, Kaposi’s sarcoma. Camptothecin has been used to treat ovarian cancer.

In 2000, Wall and Wani were awarded the $250,000 Charles F. Kettering prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation to honor their contributions in the fight against cancer. In 1998, Wall received the Alfred Burger Award from the American Chemical Society.