Enders, John Franklin (1897-1985)

US virologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1954 with Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins for their cultivation of the polio virus in the laboratory. This led to the creation of effective vaccines against polio and measles.

Enders was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. He interrupted his studies at Yale to become a flying instructor during World War I and then took up a business career but left it to study English at Harvard, before changing to medicine. He remained at Harvard Medical School, becoming professor in 1962.

Viruses cannot be grown, as bacteria can, in nutrient substances, and so a method had been developed for growing them in a living chick embryo. In 1948, Enders and his colleagues prepared a medium of homogenized chick embryo and blood and, adding penicillin to suppress bacteria, managed to grow a mumps virus in it.

Previously the polio virus could be grown only in living nerve tissue from primates. But using their method, Enders managed to grow the virus successfully on tissue scraps obtained from stillborn human embryos, and then on other tissue.

The general application of this technique meant that viruses could be more readily isolated and identified.