John Franklin Enders (February 10, 1897 – September 8, 1985) was an American biomedical scientist andNobel Laureate. Enders has been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines."[1][2]
After returning fromWorld War I, he graduated fromYale, where he was a member ofScroll and Key as well asDelta 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 aPhD atHarvard in 1930. He later joined the faculty atChildren's Hospital Boston.[3]
Enders died at his summer home inWaterford, Connecticut, aged 88, on 8 September 1985.[4] His wife died in 2000.
Meanwhile,Jonas Salk applied the Enders-Weller-Robbins technique to produce large quantities of poliovirus, and then developed apolio vaccine in 1952. Upon the 1954 polio vaccine field trial, whose success Salk announced on the radio,[9] 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.[10]
In 1954, Enders andThomas C. Peebles isolatedmeaslesvirus from an 11-year-old boy, David Edmonston.[11] 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 ofmeasles vaccine.[11] In October 1960, an Enders team began trials on 1,500 mentally retarded children in New York City and on 4,000 children inNigeria.[12]Refusing credit for merely himself whenThe 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][12] In 1963, a deactivated measles vaccine and an attenuated measles vaccine were introduced byPfizer andMerck & Co., respectively.[13]
He continued to work in virology research till the late 1970s and retired from the laboratory at the age of 80.[4][14]
^ab"The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1954".NobelPrize.org. Retrieved13 February 2021.Prize motivation:for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue.
^"Polio Hall of Fame opening ceremony, 1958 - Stock Image - C003/7443".Science Photo Library.Science Photo Library. Retrieved14 February 2021.Credit:US National Archives and Records Administration .... The busts, and those they represent (those on the wall but not present are in brackets), are, from left to right: (Jakob Heine, Karl Oskar Medin, Ivar Wickman, Karl Landsteiner), Thomas Milton Rivers, Charles Armstrong, John R. Paul, Thomas Francis, Jr., Albert Sabin, Joseph L. Melnick, Isabel Morgan, Howard A. Howe, David Bodian, (John F. Enders), Jonas E. Salk, Franklin D. Roosevelt (represented by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt), Basil O'Connor.
^Enders, John F. (December 1961)."Vaccination Against Measles: Francis Home Redivivus".The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.34 (3–4):239–260.ISSN0044-0086.PMC2605051.PMID13890171.This paper is an attempt to review in the light of earlier research certain recent work on measles virus with emphasis on the development of a living attenuated vaccine against the disease. It was presented as a Cameron Prize Lecture before the Faculty of Medicine, Edinburgh University, 16 May 1961. ....
^"Vital Statistics".The BMJ.2 (5198):612–613. 20 August 1960.doi:10.1136/bmj.2.5198.612.PMC2097362.PMID20788936.S2CID220186676.... and the Cameron Prize for Practical Therapeutics was awarded in absentia to Professor John Frank Enders, Professor of Bacteriology and Immunology in the University of car (sic), for his work on the growing of virus of poliomyelitis and other studies in viruses.
