Weller, Thomas Huckle (1915- )

US virologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for the cultivation of the polio virus in the laboratory. He shared to prize with John Enders and Frederick Robbins. In developing new ways of growing and studying the poliomyelitis virus in culture, Weller laid the groundwork for the later development of a vaccine. Weller went on to study the role of a single virus in chickenpox and shingles and to show that a single micro-organism was involved in German measles.

Weller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan in zoology in 1936. After the end of World War II, he went to work at the Boston Children's Hospital with Enders and Robbins. In 1954, he was elected to a chair in tropical public health at Harvard and retired from this post 27 years later.