John Franklin Enders

Enders was born in West Hartford, Connecticut on February 10, 1897.[3] His father, John Ostrom Enders, was CEO of the Hartford National Bank and left him a fortune of $19 million upon his death.[1] He attended the Noah Webster School in Hartford,[4] and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire.[3][5] After attending Yale University a short time, he joined the United States Army Air Corps in 1918 as a flight instructor and a lieutenant.

After returning from World War I, he graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Scroll and Key as well as Delta Kappa Epsilon. He went into real estate in 1922, and tried several careers before choosing the biomedical field with a focus on infectious diseases, gaining a PhD at Harvard in 1930. He later joined the faculty at Children's Hospital Boston.[3]

Enders died at his summer home in Waterford, Connecticut, aged 88, on 8 September 1985.[4] His wife died in 2000.

In 1949, Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins reported successful in vitro culture of an animal virus—poliovirus.[6] The three received the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue".[7]

Meanwhile, Jonas Salk applied the Enders-Weller-Robbins technique to produce large quantities of poliovirus, and then developed a polio vaccine in 1952. Upon the 1954 polio vaccine field trial, whose success Salk announced on the radio,[8] Salk became a public hero but failed to credit the many other researchers that his effort rode upon, and was somewhat shunned by America's scientific establishment.[9]

In 1954, Enders and Thomas C. Peebles isolated measlesvirus from an 11-year-old boy, David Edmonston.[10] Disappointed by polio vaccine's development and involvement in some cases of polio and death—what Enders attributed to Salk's technique—Enders began development of measles vaccine.[10] In October 1960, an Enders team began trials on 1,500 mentally retarded children in New York City and on 4,000 children in Nigeria.[11] Refusing credit for merely himself when The New York Times announced the measles vaccine effective on September 17, 1961, Enders wrote to the newspaper to acknowledge the work of various colleagues and the collaborative nature of the research.[4][11] In 1963, a deactivated measles vaccine and an attenuated measles vaccine were introduced by Pfizer and Merck & Co., respectively.[12]

He continued to work in virology research till the late 1970s and retired from the laboratory at the age of 80.[4][13]

Bust of John Enders in the Polio Hall of Fame

• 1946: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[14]
• 1953: Member of the American Philosophical Society[15]
• 1954: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Frederick Chapman Robbins and Thomas Huckle Weller)[7][16][17]
• 1954: Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research[18]
• 1955: Kyle Award from the U.S. Public Health Service[19]
• 1955: Member of the American Philosophical Society[20]
• 1958: inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame[21]
• 1960: Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh[22][23]
• 1962: Robert Koch Prize[24]
• 1963: Presidential Medal of Freedom[25]
• 1963: Science Achievement Award from the American Medical Association[26]
• 1967: Foreign Member, The Royal Society[1]

Enders also held honorary doctoral degrees from 13 universities.[27]

• Anna Mitus

• Oakes, Elizabeth H. (2007). Encyclopedia of World Scientists. New York: Facts on File.
• Tyrrell, D. A. J. (1987). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society Vol. 33. The Royal Society.

• John F. Enders on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1954 The Cultivation of the Poliomyelitis Viruses in Tissue Culture
• John Franklin Enders Papers (MS 1478). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.