| var s_account="msnportalencarta"; Print Frederick Chapman Robbins Article View On the File menu, click Print to print the information. Frederick Chapman Robbins Frederick Chapman Robbins (1916-2003), American bacteriologist and Nobel laureate. Robbins's research helped speed the development of a vaccine ( see Immunization) for poliomyelitis (better known as polio or infantile paralysis), an infectious viral disease that can cause paralysis and that struck large numbers of children in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s. Robbins and his fellow researchers, American microbiologist John Franklin Enders and American virologist Thomas Huckle Weller, were the first to succeed in growing the polio virus on tissue in the laboratory, making it possible for the virus to be studied in detail by many researchers. For their contribution to the development of a polio vaccine, Robbins, Enders, and Weller were awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Born in Auburn, Alabama, Robbins grew up in Columbia, Missouri. He received a B.S. degree in 1936 and an M.S. degree in premedical studies in 1938 from the University of Missouri and an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1940. After medical school he began training as a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, but he interrupted his studies to join the United States Army Medical Corps during World War II (1939-1945). Serving in North Africa and Italy, Robbins was awarded a Bronze Star in 1945 for his research on bacterial and viral diseases. In 1946 he returned to the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, where in 1948 he joined the Research Division of Infectious Disease, headed by Enders. In 1952 Robbins joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve Medical School. He served as dean of the school from 1966 to 1980. From 1980 to 1985 Robbins was president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. | |
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