Growing Pathogens in Tissue Cultures: Fifty Years in Academic Tropical Medicine, Pediatrics, and Virology (review)

It was fifty years ago that Thomas Weller shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology with John Enders and Fredrick Robbins for their discovery of a technique for growing poliomyelitis viruses in tissue culture. The technique facilitated the manufacture of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines—yet, as Weller's autobiography shows, the impact of tissue culture on medical virus research extended well beyond these biomedical icons. Tissue-culture techniques played a key role in virology's formation as a discipline in the 1950s: they revolutionized virus assays and vaccine production; they helped put workable diagnostic tools for virus diseases in the hands of hospital and public health laboratories; they were vehicles for making virology relevant to medicine.

Weller's autobiography is a testament of these developments. It also reminds us of the ways in which a discovery can shape and make a medical scientific career. Weller spent the better part of his working life at two Harvard institutions, the Research Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital and the prestigious Harvard School of Public Health, and the main parts of this book follow him through these institutions. He provides a window onto the social life there, albeit one framed by his personal and professional interactions.

Following a brief introduction to his childhood and student days, Weller devotes part 2 to his development as a virus worker. The story concentrates on his life in the laboratory at Children's Hospital, where he stayed until 1954. He trained here under Enders in the late 1930s; after the war, Enders brought him to the Research Division in 1947. Working with Robbins, and guided by Enders, in 1949 Weller devised the team's revolutionary technique. Besides isolating poliomyelitis virus, he used variations of the technique to isolate varicella-zoster virus, rubella virus, and the cytomegaloviruses. Weller's discussion of his apprenticeship in virus research, the making of tissue cultures, and his important studies of virus diseases illuminates key aspects of mid-twentieth-century virus work. One of the strengths of part 2 is the insight it gives into the process, and the politics, of postwar medical virus research. Weller revisits the well-known controversy around the testing and production of Salk's vaccine. While he kept his views private at the time, he links the infamous Cutter incident to shortcomings in Salk's clinical trials and the rush to get the vaccine into wide use.

Weller's early successes opened doors at Harvard, which saw him quickly move from being a laboratory researcher to an institute-builder, administrator, and key player in Harvard's School of Public Health. Part 3 describes this shift. In 1954, he became Strong Professor and Chairman of Tropical Public Health. The position gave him leverage to expand the department into the unrivaled center of American tropical medicine.

Besides the institutional story, Weller describes the changing fortunes of tropical medicine and international health in the latter half of the twentieth century. During the Cold War, tropical public health initiatives received considerable support from the U.S. government and private patrons—yet by the early 1980s, American tropical medicine had but a marginal place in medical curricula and governmental funding. Unfortunately, Weller offers few explanations for this decline. He does argue, however, that this shift in priorities has had implications for the capacity of the United States to respond to emerging infectious diseases. He ends on a cautionary note: he pleads for a return to the basic principles of tropical medicine that he sought to create at Harvard, which combine an approach to disease in ecological terms with programs aimed at Third World development. These are laudable goals.

Autobiographies of eminent scientists tend to make for poor history. Weller's story is often anecdotal and episodic. Still, it represents a...