Thomas H. Weller

Thomas H. Weller (born June 15, 1915, Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.—died Aug. 23, 2008, Needham, Mass.) was an American physician and virologist who was the corecipient (with John Enders and Frederick Robbins) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for the successful cultivation of poliomyelitis virus in tissue cultures. This made it possible to study the virus “in the test tube”—a procedure that led to the development of polio vaccines.

After his education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (A.B., 1936; M.S., 1937) and Harvard University (M.D., 1940), Weller became a teaching fellow at the Harvard Medical School (1940–42) and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II. He was appointed assistant director of Enders’ infectious diseases laboratory at the Children’s Medical Center, Boston (1949–55), and, working with Enders and Robbins, soon achieved the propagation of poliomyelitis virus in laboratory suspensions of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue. He was also the first (with the American physician Franklin Neva) to achieve the laboratory propagation of rubella (German measles) virus and to isolate chicken pox virus from human cell cultures. Weller became professor of tropical public health at Harvard University in 1954 and from 1966 to 1981 served also as director of the Center for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases at the Harvard University School of Public Health. Weller’s autobiography, Growing Pathogens in Tissue Cultures: Fifty Years in Academic Tropical Medicine, Pediatrics, and Virology, was published in 2004.