Eleanor Roosevelt Institute for Cancer Research Records

Dr. Theodore Thomas Puck (1916-2005), the Institute's founding scientist, was a geneticist and a pioneer of somatic cell genetics and single-cell plating (cloning) and later studied the genetic causes of cancer. Puck earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago and served as chairman of the University of Colorado Medical Center's Department of Biophysics from 1948 to 1967. The Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (ERI) was founded in... 1959 as the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute for Cancer Research. Originally to be located at the American Medical Center, Denver, Colo., it was finally constructed at the University of Colorado Medical Center (later called the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center) in 1961. It moved to the University of Denver in 2003. The Institute was founded to promote biomedical and genetic research as cost-effective, long-term approach to the conquest of human afflictions like cancer, premature aging, birth defects and genetic diseases.