Polio Prize

For their discovery of the ability of the poliomyelitis virus to grow in cultures of different tissues, as the citation dryly put it, three U.S. scientists last week won the coveted 1954 Nobel Prize ($36,000) for medicine. They were Harvard's famed Virologist John Franklin Enders, 57 (no M.D. but a Ph.D. in bacteriology and immunology), and two who had worked with him on the project: Dr. Thomas H. Weller, 39, of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Frederick C. Robbins, 38, now of Cleveland's Western Reserve Medical School.

Recognition of the great accomplishment of Enders & Co. came because it served as a steppingstone for Pittsburgh's Dr. Jonas E. Salk (TIME, March 29), who developed the actual polio vaccine. But to Connecticut-born John Enders, the polio virus discovery is an incident in a life dedicated to battle against the minutest and most insidious of man's microbial enemies, the viruses. To find better ways of combating such children's diseases as mumps, measles, chicken pox and polio, it was necessary first to find better ways of growing the offending viruses in the test tube. The polio virus was an especially bad actor: it seemed willing to grow only in brain or nerve tissue of men or monkeys, and any vaccine prepared from such a growth would be potentially deadly.

Enders' team had some success growing it in tissues from human embryos (after therapeutic abortions), but these are hard to get in the U.S. Next they tried human foreskins, which are more plentiful. Finally, they found a way to do it in tissues from monkey kidneys. Equally important, they perfected a mechanical technique which has been adapted to assembly-line mass production, and gave Dr. Salk and other researchers enough viruses to work with.

Laboratories around the world are full of other viruses growing happily in Enders tissue cultures. For years to come, progress against many another disease besides polio will be made by researchers standing on Enders' steppingstone.

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