Countway Library of Medicine, xx
Dr. Thomas H. Weller, the Harvard virologist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing techniques to grow the polio virus in the laboratory, a feat that laid the groundwork for the development of the polio vaccine and the feared virus' near-eradication from the world, died in his sleep Saturday at his home in Needham, Mass. He was 93.
The techniques developed by Weller, Dr. John F. Enders and Dr. Frederick C. Robbins made it possible to grow a host of other viruses in the laboratory and led to the creation of many other vaccines.
Weller also isolated the rubella (German measles) and herpes zoster viruses and demonstrated that the rubella virus and cytomegalovirus could be transmitted congenitally to fetuses, producing birth defects.
Weller obituary: The obituary of Nobel laureate Dr. Thomas H. Weller in Wednesday's California section said Weller had isolated the herpes zoster virus and demonstrated that it was identical to the rubella virus. Weller found that the herpes zoster and varicella viruses are the same.
Weller "was one of the great scientists of the 20th century and a leader in neglected tropical diseases," said Dr. Dyann Wirth, chairwoman of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health, where Weller spent most of his career. "He inspired many during his lifetime, and his vision led an entire field for many decades. His legacy is one to be remembered."
In the late 1940s, when Weller and Robbins were research fellows in Enders' Harvard laboratory, viruses could not be seen with the tools then available. Working with the viruses required injecting them into monkeys or other laboratory animals and observing their effects.
Small amounts of the polio virus had been isolated from the brain and nervous system of monkeys, but attempts to produce a vaccine from them were failures or even catastrophic. Some of the vaccines simply did not work, while others were contaminated with nerve tissue that produced disastrous inflammation in the brains of recipients.
The Harvard trio stumbled upon their discovery almost by accident. It was, Weller later wrote, "almost an afterthought." They had been trying to grow the varicella (chickenpox) virus in a mixture of human embryonic nerve, skin, muscle and gut cells.
"We had no immediate intention of carrying out experiments with poliomyelitis viruses," they wrote in their 1949 paper in the journal Science describing the research. "Nevertheless, from time to time, we had considered the mounting evidence" that the polio virus might be able to grow in tissues other than nerve cells.
