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Thomas Huckle Weller
(1915)
American physician and virologist who was the corecipient (with John
Enders and Frederick Robbins) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
in 1954 for the successful cultivation of poliomyelitis virus in tissue
cultures. This made it possible to study the virus "in the test
tube"--a procedure that led to the development of polio vaccines.
After his education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (A.B.,
1936; M.S., 1937) and Harvard University (M.D., 1940), Weller became
a teaching fellow at the Harvard Medical School (1940-42) and served
in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II. He was appointed
assistant director of Enders' infectious diseases laboratory at the
Children's Medical Center, Boston (1949-55), and, working with Enders
and Robbins, soon achieved the propagation of poliomyelitis virus in
laboratory suspensions of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue. He
was also the first (with the American physician Franklin Neva) to achieve
the laboratory propagation of rubella (German measles) virus and to
isolate chicken pox virus from human cell cultures. Weller became professor
of tropical public health at Harvard University in 1954 and from 1966
to 1981 served also as director of the Center for the Prevention of
Infectious Diseases, Harvard University School of Public Health.
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