Thomas Huckle Weller

Thomas Huckle Weller (1915-2008), American virologist and Nobel Prize winner whose techniques for growing viruses in laboratory cell cultures helped to revolutionize research on viruses in the 1940s and 1950s. Although he isolated many important viruses in the course of his career, Weller is best known for assisting in the first successful effort to grow, in many different tissue types, the virus that causes poliomyelitis (more widely known as polio). This effort was essential in the development of vaccines against this crippling disease. For his groundbreaking work on the polio virus, Weller received the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which he shared with American biologists John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Weller studied medical zoology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, receiving his B.S. degree in 1936 and his M.S. degree in 1937. He attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1940. Weller then joined the staff of Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, interrupting his residency to serve in the United States Army Medical Corps during World War II (1939-1945), at which time he studied tropical diseases in Puerto Rico. After the war, he returned to Children’s Hospital, joining a new infectious-disease laboratory headed by Enders. The two set about developing cell cultures in which viruses could be grown. Viruses will grow only in living tissue, and the challenge faced by Weller and Enders was to find a medium that would support viral growth.

Weller’s early efforts centered on the virus that causes chicken pox (varicella), which will grow only in human tissue. Weller developed cultures based on tissue from human embryos. Toward the end of the 1940s Weller and his colleagues, including his former roommate from medical school, Robbins, decided to try and grow the virus that causes polio. This communicable disease—in which the virus attacks the cells of the nervous system, often causing paralysis—was the most dreaded illness of the 1940s. Researchers believed that the polio virus would grow only in nerve cells. In 1948, thanks largely to cell-culture methods refined by Weller, the Children’s Hospital laboratory team succeeded in growing polio in human cells that were not derived from the nervous system. By using penicillin and other recently developed antibiotics, Weller and his colleagues prevented their cell cultures from being overgrown by bacteria—a problem that had thwarted previous researchers.

The cell-culture techniques pioneered by Weller made possible the detailed study of the polio virus and the ultimate development of the first polio vaccine in 1953. The advancements made by Weller and his collaborators also accelerated research into many other types of viruses. Researchers no longer had to rely on experimental animals, but could investigate viruses much more quickly and conveniently in laboratory cultures. Later in his career, Weller succeeded in isolating the chicken-pox virus, as well as cytomegalovirus, which is responsible for many diseases of the newborn, such as hearing loss and mental retardation.

Weller served as director of the Center for Prevention of Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was made professor emeritus upon his retirement in 1985. He was also a consultant to a number of organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Rockefeller Foundation.