Weller, Thomas Huckle

▪ 2009

      American physician and virologist

born June 15, 1915, Ann Arbor, Mich.

died Aug. 23, 2008, Needham, Mass.

was in 1954 the corecipient (with John Enders and Frederick Robbins) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the successful cultivation of poliomyelitis virus in tissue cultures. This breakthrough, which was announced to the public in 1949, 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 (1940–42) at the Harvard Medical School; he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II. Weller joined (1947) Enders's infectious diseases laboratory at the Children's Medical Center, Boston, and served (1949–55) as assistant director. He worked with Enders and Robbins and soon achieved the propagation of poliomyelitis virus in laboratory suspensions of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue. Weller 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. In 1954 Weller became professor of tropical public health at Harvard University, and he also served (1966–81) as director of the Center for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases at the Harvard University School of Public Health. His autobiography, Growing Pathogens in Tissue Cultures: Fifty Years in Academic Tropical Medicine, Pediatrics, and Virology, was published in 2004.

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