The First Measles Vaccine

Like in the more familiar story of polio vaccine, the development of the first successful live attenuated vaccine against measles began in the laboratory of John Enders. One of the greatest virologists of the 20th century, Enders pioneered the technique of viral tissue culture, which makes it possible to grow viruses in vitro in cells nourished in laboratory media. 1 In 1949, he and his pediatric infectious disease fellows Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins showed that poliovirus could be cultivated in tissue of nonneuronal origins, a discovery that set the stage for the first successful vaccines against the disease and led to a Nobel Prize in 1954. 2 Enders himself was a remarkable character. He never tried to patent his work or share results with the media before peer review. He was consistently generous in sharing his knowledge with potential competitors, and despite his personal wealth he was equally known for his frugality; fellows learned to wash their own glassware, and every year the “chief” returned unspent grant money to the National Institutes of Health. Above all, Enders took seriously the role of mentor, rounding each day beside the benches of his select group of fellows with his bow tie, vest, and jacket asking, “Well, what's new? ” A positive response was often rewarded by an hour-long conversation. 3 In 1954, while the national field trials of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine captivated media attention, Enders and pediatrician Thomas Peebles successfully cultivated measles virus in human kidney cell culture for the first time. 4 Ever-ingenious in finding sources for his tissue cultures, Enders obtained kidneys from a neurosurgeon colleague who treated hydrocephalus by performing a unilateral nephrectomy and connecting a shunt to carry cerebrospinal fluid to the ureter. Peebles traveled the Boston, Massachusetts, area with a throat swab in search of measles … Address correspondence to Jeffrey P. Baker, MD, PhD, Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, Box 3040 DUMC, Durham, NC 27710. E-mail: baker009atmc. duke. edu