| var s_account="msnportalencarta"; Print Thomas Huckle Weller Article View On the File menu, click Print to print the information. Thomas Huckle Weller Thomas Huckle Weller , born in 1915, American virologist and Nobel Prize winner whose techniques for growing viruses in laboratory cell cultures helped to revolutionize research on viruses in the 1940s and 1950s. Although he isolated many important viruses in the course of his career, Weller is best known for assisting in the first successful effort to grow, in many different tissue types, the virus that causes poliomyelitis (more widely known as polio). This effort was essential in the development of vaccines against this crippling disease. For his groundbreaking work on the polio virus, Weller received the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which he shared with American biologists John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Weller studied medical zoology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, receiving his B.S. degree in 1936 and his M.S. degree in 1937. He attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1940. Weller then joined the staff of Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, interrupting his residency to serve in the United States Army Medical Corps during World War II (1939-1945), at which time he studied tropical diseases in Puerto Rico. After the war, he returned to Children's Hospital, joining a new infectious-disease laboratory headed by Enders. The two set about developing cell cultures in which viruses could be grown. Viruses will grow only in living tissue, and the challenge faced by Weller and Enders was to find a medium that would support viral growth. | |
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