Frederick Chapman Robbins

Frederick Chapman Robbins (1916-2003), American bacteriologist and Nobel laureate. Robbins's research helped speed the development of a vaccine (see Immunization) for poliomyelitis (better known as polio or infantile paralysis), an infectious viral disease that can cause paralysis and that struck large numbers of children in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s. Robbins and his fellow researchers, American microbiologist John Franklin Enders and American virologist Thomas Huckle Weller, were the first to succeed in growing the polio virus on tissue in the laboratory, making it possible for the virus to be studied in detail by many researchers. For their contribution to the development of a polio vaccine, Robbins, Enders, and Weller were awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Born in Auburn, Alabama, Robbins grew up in Columbia, Missouri. He received a B.S. degree in 1936 and an M.S. degree in premedical studies in 1938 from the University of Missouri and an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1940. After medical school he began training as a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, but he interrupted his studies to join the United States Army Medical Corps during World War II (1939-1945). Serving in North Africa and Italy, Robbins was awarded a Bronze Star in 1945 for his research on bacterial and viral diseases. In 1946 he returned to the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, where in 1948 he joined the Research Division of Infectious Disease, headed by Enders. In 1952 Robbins joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve Medical School. He served as dean of the school from 1966 to 1980. From 1980 to 1985 Robbins was president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Because viruses will not grow outside of living tissue, the challenge for Robbins and his colleagues at the Research Division of Infectious Disease was to develop tissue cultures in which viruses could be grown and studied in the laboratory. Although his early research centered on a virus that caused diarrhea in infants, Robbins—along with Enders and fellow researcher Weller—began to focus on the dreaded polio virus in 1947. This virus, after entering the human body through the nose or mouth, multiplies quickly and often attacks the nerve cells (see Nervous System) that control muscles. Polio epidemics in the 1940s had left many young victims paralyzed, and fear of contracting the communicable disease was constant and widespread. At the time that Robbins was beginning his research, scientists believed that the polio virus would grow only in nerve cells. However, Robbins and his colleagues developed cell cultures based on tissues from mice—and from humans—that improved considerably on the efforts of earlier researchers. In 1948 the team demonstrated that the polio virus would grow in human cells that were not derived from the nervous system.

Using newly developed antibiotics such as penicillin, the scientists prevented bacteria from contaminating their virus cultures, avoiding a problem that had plagued previous researchers. This new method for growing quantities of the polio virus in many different types of cell tissue greatly accelerated polio research and opened the way for American physician and epidemiologist Jonas Salk and American virologist Albert Sabin to develop the first polio vaccines. Eventually polio was largely eliminated as a health problem in the developed world.

The work of Robbins, Enders, and Weller expanded the scope of infectious disease research, enabling other scientists to isolate a wide variety of viruses that cause disease. Fifty years after its discovery, their tissue culture technique was used to identify the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the contagious respiratory illness that reached near-epidemic proportions in some parts of Asia and Canada in 2003.