Thursday - August 28, 2008

AN AMERICAN MOST AMERICAN NEVER HEARD OF. BUT LEAVE IT TO THE BRITS TO KNOW.

An obit on a brilliant American scientist and I’ll bet it isn’t covered like this in most American papers at home.

Wouldn’t hurt any of you guys to read this. 

Thomas H Weller
Medical research scientist whose work on the polio virus was rewarded with a share in a Nobel Prize.

Last Updated: 10:04PM BST 27 Aug 2008

Thomas H Weller, who has died aged 93, shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1954 for his work with the three-man team which made possible a vaccine against polio.

Weller shared the prize with John F Enders and Frederick C Robbins, two colleagues at the Boston Children’s Hospital. Their discovery in 1949 that the poliomyelitis virus could be grown outside human or monkey nerve cells led four years later to the development of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine.

The importance of their achievement should be seen in the context of the immediate post-war period, when polio was much feared, particularly as it usually afflicted children and could cause paralysis and death. In 1952 there were some 58,000 cases in the United States; in England and Wales in 1955, before immunisation became available, there were nearly 4,000 reported cases.

Before Enders, Robbins and Weller carried out their research it had been thought that the polio virus would grow only in the nerve tissues of humans and a few species of monkey. The three scientists demonstrated that strains of the virus could also be grown in tissue cultures, allowing scientists to study it under a microscope and observe its behaviour.

The immediate effect was to improve the speed of diagnosis. Then in 1953 Salk announced that he had used the Boston team’s technique for growing the polio virus in cultures of non-nervous tissues to come up with a vaccine. This was administered by injection; a few years later Albert Sabin developed his more effective, orally-administered vaccine.

In 1954 – the year in which Weller, Enders, and Robbins won the Nobel Prize – there were 28,000 cases of polio
in the United States. Less than a decade later there were only 121.

In 1955 Weller also isolated and grew the causative agent of chicken pox and shingles; and in 1963 he and three other researchers isolated the virus that causes German measles.

Thomas Huckle Weller was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 15 1915. His father was chairman of the pathology department at Michigan University, where Thomas was a student before going on to Harvard Medical School to read Pathology, Bacteriology and Medicine.

During the Second World War Weller was attached to a US Army laboratory on Puerto Rico that was responsible for malaria control at American bases in the Caribbean. Then in 1946 he became a research fellow in paediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and began working with Enders at the new research division of infectious diseases. Robbins joined them the next year.

Weller was also widely respected for his work in the field of tropical medicine. He was appointed Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1954, and remained professor emeritus until his death on August 23.

From 1953 to 1959 he was director of the commission on parasitic diseases at the American Armed Forces Epidemiological Board. He headed the department of tropical public health at Harvard from 1954 to 1981, and was a past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene – he was awarded that organisation’s Walter Reed Medal in 1996.

Thomas Weller is survived by his wife, Kathleen, and two sons and a daughter.

http://tinyurl.com/5jttsx

Posted by Drew458     on 08/28/2008 at 11:37 AM   
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