Thomas Huckle Weller

Thomas Huckle Weller was an American virologist, born on 15 June 1915 and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father Carl Vernon Weller was a professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Michigan. He studied medical zoology there, with a master thesis on fish parasites, then entered Harvard Medical School in 1936 and from 1939 worked under John Franklin Enders, who involved him in research on viruses and tissue-culture techniques for determining the causes of infectious disease. He received his MD in 1940 and during World War II served in the Army Medical Corps in Puerto Rico, heading the departments of bacteriology, virology and parasitology at the Antilles Medical Laboratory. In 1954, with Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing how to cultivate poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube using human embryonic skin and muscle tissue. He also contributed to the treatment of schistosomiasis and to work on Coxsackie viruses, was the first to isolate the virus responsible for chickenpox, and in 1954 became head of the Tropical Public Health Department at the Harvard School of Public Health. He died on 23 August 2008.