John Franklin Enders

John Franklin Enders (1897–1985) was an American biomedical scientist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating that poliovirus could grow in tissue cultures.

Connect

Thomas Huckle Weller: An American virologist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize for cultivating poliovirus in tissue cultures. Weller collaborated with Enders and Frederick Robbins on the work recognized by the Nobel Prize.
Tissue culture: The growth and maintenance of cells or tissues outside an organism under controlled conditions. Enders’s poliovirus experiments depended on growing living cells outside the body.
Harvard University: A private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636. Enders studied and later conducted the virology research that earned him the Nobel Prize at Harvard.
Polio eradication: The global effort to interrupt poliovirus transmission and eliminate poliomyelitis. Reliable virus cultivation supported vaccine development central to eradication campaigns.
Frederick Chapman Robbins: An American pediatrician and virologist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize for cultivating poliovirus in tissue cultures. Robbins helped demonstrate with Enders and Weller that poliovirus could grow outside nerve tissue.
Poliovirus: An enterovirus that infects humans and can cause poliomyelitis. Enders and colleagues showed it could multiply in non-neural tissue cultures.
Poliomyelitis: A viral disease that can damage motor neurons and cause permanent paralysis. The search for a way to study its virus in the laboratory motivated Enders’s breakthrough.
Viral vaccine: A vaccine that uses viral material to induce protective immunity against a viral disease. Enders’s methods helped make laboratory-grown viruses available for vaccine research and manufacture.
Jonas Salk: An American physician and virologist who developed the first widely used inactivated polio vaccine. Tissue-culture-grown poliovirus made large-scale production of Salk’s vaccine possible.
Virus propagation: The multiplication of viruses in living cells or organisms for study or production. Cultivating poliovirus transformed its propagation from a difficult biological task into a laboratory procedure.