Google Doodle pays tribute to the Greek medical pioneer Georgios Papanikolaou, who invented the smear test to detect early signs of cervical and uterine cancer.

Mr Papanikolaou was born in the Greek costal town of Kymi in 1883. The second son of a mayor and a doctor, he showed early interests in both music and the humanities before enrolling in a medical course at the University of Athens aged just 15.

After a string of low-paid jobs in New York, including as a carpet seller, violin player and clerk at a newspaper, he eventually found work as a medical researcher at New York University and Cornell University.

He began his research into cervical cancer while at Cornell and later invented the Papanicolaou smear test – now better known as the Pap smear – to screen women for early signs of the disease.

His landmark book Diagnosis of Uterine Cancer by the Vaginal Smear, co written with Dr Herbert Traut and published in 1943, helped to detail his findings.

Mr Papanikolaou died in 1962, aged 78, after suffering a heart attack. At the time of his death he had planned to develop a cancer research institute at the University of Miami.

He was named the second greatest Greek of all time in a poll conducted by Skai TV in 2009, after earning more than 100,000 votes. He was beaten only by Alexander the Great, the ancient king of Macedonia and military commander.

The pap smear, which is widely used today, helps detect early signs of cervical cancer by analyzing changes in cells taken from a woman’s cervix (though a men’s version exists too, and is used to test for anal cancer). Before the broad acceptance of the pap smear, cervical cancer was still a leading killer of women. But between 1955 and 1992, rates of cervical cancer deaths declined by 60 percent, largely due to the test, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Because of the impact of his work, Papanikolaou was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology 18 times in four separate years: 1948, 1949, 1951, 1953, and again, for an unlisted number of times in 1959 (his name is spelled “Papanicolaou” in the Nobel archive). Each time, he lost out. In an interview published in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, his student Neda Voutsa-Perdiki, former Director of Exfoliative Cytology at the University of Florida, noted that Papanikolaou’s near misses were “a matter of bad luck and definitely not a matter of failure.”