Weller, Nobel-Prize Winning Public Health Researcher, Dead at 93

Thomas H. Weller, a Nobel laureate who spent decades as a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and whose tissue-culture research paved the way to the development of vaccines for polio and other viral diseases such as chicken pox and measles, died on Aug. 23 at his home in Needham, Mass. He was 93.

“He was fortunately at home,” said his son Peter F. Weller, a professor at Harvard Medical School who announced his father’s death. “He passed away quietly in his sleep.”

Weller received the 1954 Nobel Prize for Medicine with two of his Harvard colleagues—John P. Enders, Weller’s former professor at the Medical School, and Frederick C. Robbins—for their research on polio. The researchers reported successfully cultivating poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube for the first time in 1949, using tissue taken from a monkey. (Enders died in 1985, Robbins in 2003.)

The discovery was instrumental in the development of vaccines for polio, a viral infectious disease eliminated from the Americas in 1994, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 16,000 cases of paralytic polio were recorded every year in the U.S. before a vaccine was first introduced in 1952 by Jonas Salk and in 1962 by Albert Sabin. Only four countries are still listed as never having interrupted endemic transmission of polio as of 2006, according to the World Health Organization.

Weller, who retired from his Harvard teaching responsibilities in 1980, went on to isolate and grow varicella-zoster viruses for chicken pox and shingles and cytomegalovirus, a member of the herpesvirus family that can cause birth defects. With the urine sample of his 10-year-old son Robert A. Weller, who developed a severe case of the measles, Weller and his Harvard colleague, Franklin A. Neva, identified the virus for rubella, or German measles in 1960.

“Beyond his pioneering scientific breakthroughs in growing polio in culture and discovering varicella and rubella viruses, all of which made the new vaccines possible, Professor Weller became a champion for public health and the effort to focus the best of science on the diseases and health problems of the poorest people on the globe,” School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom said in a statement. “His impact has been incalculable, and his legacy will be something cherished by generations to come at HSPH and far beyond.”

Thomas Huckle Weller was born on June 15, 1915 in Ann Arbor, Mich. The son and grandson of physicians—his father, Carl V. Weller was a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School—Weller would receive his A.B. and S.M. degrees from the university.

The year after graduating from Michigan, Weller left for Harvard Medical School—in part, because he felt as though “he knew Michigan,” Peter Weller said. There, Weller conducted research for the Department of Comparative Pathology and Tropical Medicine.

The greatest influence on Weller’s later work would be then-Medical School professor Enders, who accepted Weller as a tutorial student in 1939. Enders pushed Weller to apply tissue-culture techniques to studying causes of infectious diseases.

In 1940, Weller received his M.D. from Harvard and began clinical training at the Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston. But his work was interrupted two years later by World War II, when Weller shipped off to a research post in Puerto Rico that was responsible for malaria control of Caribbean bases. During his 32 months there, he headed the bacteriology, virology, and parasitology department.

When the newly-minted major returned to Children’s in 1946, he resumed clinical training. In 1949, Weller assisted Enders in the establishment of a new division on infectious diseases—Weller was appointed assistant director.

Beginning as a teaching fellow, Weller eventually became an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Pathology and Tropical Medicine at the Medical School (the department was later renamed and transferred to the School of Public Health). In July 1954, Weller was appointed professor of tropical public health and head of the department at the school. He retired in 1980, and took emeritus status in 1985.

“He took great pride in his teaching at Harvard Medical School,” Peter Weller said. “He had great pride in many of the students and fellow junior faculty who worked with him”—many of who would go on to serve major roles at government control centers.

Weller was a member of the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, and the International Health Organization of the Rockefeller Foundation. Consultative assignments took him to St. Lucia, Trinidad, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. In 1972, Weller helped to establish the Wellcome Trust, a research and training center in Salvador, Brazil, for young physicians and scientists interested in tropical medicine.

In 2004, Weller published his autobiography, "Growing Pathogens in Tissue Cultures: Fifty Years in Academic Tropical Medicine, Pediatrics, and Virology."

Weller is survived by his wife, Kathleen F. Weller; two sons, Peter and Robert; two daughters, Janet L. Weller and Nancy K. Weller; and six grandchildren.

When asked if his father influenced his line of work, Peter recalled that his father used to return home from work with varicella and rubella samples from him and his brother.

“Those were very common childhood viral diseases,” Peter said. "Now, we all get vaccines."

—Staff Writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff Writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.