Thomas Weller, who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine for propagating polio virus in culture, passed away on Saturday, August 23rd. He was 93. "Thomas Weller was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century," said Dyann Wirth in linkurl:statement;http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2008-releases/thomas-weller-nobel-laureate-professor-emeritus-dies.html released by the Harvard School of Public Health, where she is chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases. "His legacy is one to be remembered." In March of 1948, Weller, at the time a research scientist in the lab of John Enders at Children's Hospital in Boston, attempted to grow chickenpox virus (varicella-zoster virus) in eight flasks of human embryonic muscle and skin tissue. With four flasks left over from the experiment, Weller chose to inoculate them with poliovirus from the lab refrigerator. "It was almost an afterthought," Weller wrote in his 2004 linkurl:autobiography.;http://books.google.com/books?id=jYbqLuOVJlEC&dq=thomas+weller+growing+pathogens&pg=PP1&ots=mpl1OzbmPj&sig=h9nqBlQiOm_KMBIT9LWrppUL3I0&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result Though the chicken pox virus failed to grow, Enders, Weller, and Weller's...
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