Frederick Chapman Robbins

Frederick Chapman Robbins (1916 to 2003) was an American pediatrician and virologist. Born in Auburn, Alabama, and raised in Columbia, Missouri, he studied at the University of Missouri and Harvard University. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Franklin Enders and Thomas Huckle Weller for breakthrough work in isolating and growing the poliovirus in tissue culture, which paved the way for the vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. In 1952 he became professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University and served as dean of its School of Medicine from 1966 to 1980. In 1980 he became president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and he returned to Case Western Reserve in 1985 as dean emeritus, remaining a fixture there until his death.