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Thomas Weller, 93, paved the way for polio vaccine

Thomas Weller, a tropical-medicine specialist whose tissue-culture research in 1949 made development of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines possible and won him a share in a Nobel Prize, died on Aug. 23 at his home in Needham, Massachusetts. He was 93.

Weller's death was announced by his son Dr. Peter Weller.

The 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Weller and two colleagues at Harvard, John Enders and Frederick Robbins, for their application of tissue-culture methods to the study of viral diseases. Vaccines for other viral diseases, like chicken pox and measles, also stemmed from the Enders-Robbins-Weller method.

Weller was an emeritus professor of tropical medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health, retiring from his research and teaching duties in 1980.
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune