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In 1948, while his lab was partly financed by a grant from the National Foundation, Enders took a flyer in polio virus culture. With Drs. Frederick Robbins and Thomas Weller, he found a way to grow the virus so that a safe vaccine could be made. For this work, on which the Salk and all later polio vaccines are based, the trio got a 1954 Nobel Prize. Harvard recognized Dr. Enders' greatness by naming him a full professor in 1956. Perpetual Fame. In 1953 Enders asked Dr. Thomas Peebles, assistant in his lab at Children's Hospital in Boston, whether he would like to take a crack at measles. Peebles would and did. First he needed some measles virus to work with. He thought he was getting it from measles-stricken students at the Fay School in nearby Southboro. But his first cultures turned up only cold-sore viruses or nothing at all. Then, from the blood and throat washings of David Edmonston, 11, son of a mathematician in Bethesda, Md., Peebles cultured what proved to be the virus of measles. If the vaccine based on this work fulfills the researchers' hopes, Edmonston, now a high school senior, will enjoy vicarious but perpetual fame in the annals of medicine.
From its isolation in 1954 until it could be attenuated for trial as a vaccine in monkeys, the Edmonston strain took almost four years of exquisitely refined laboratory techniques and testing. Dr. Enders put a series of assistants to work on it in turn. Each kept the virus growing while transplanting it from one tissue-culture pot to another. One grew it in cultures of cells from human kidneys. Another kept it going through 28 transplantations in cells of human amnion ("bag of waters"). A third got it to flourish in the amnion of fertilized hens' eggs. Dr. Samuel L. Katz took it from there, found that by this time the virus would multiply in chick-embryo cells growing in test tubes.
Drs. Enders and Katz soon found that in monkeys Edmonston virus causes a mild infection that provokes the subject to make antibodies against the measles virus. And antibody preparations from monkeys' blood provided the first sure test for the presence of measles virus.
Encouraging Tests. Dr. Katz began needle work on children. (Dr. Enders, no M.D., cannot give injections to human subjects.) The first dozen cases were encouraging enough for the Boston group to send vaccine to pediatric researchers in New York (Staten Island), Cleveland and Denver. Of the first 171 who had the vaccine injected just under the skin, 83% developed a fever that usually lasted less than three days. It was lower than the fever of ordinary measles, with a mean of 102.4° (rectal). About half the children developed a rash. Again it was milder than that of natural measles, and only 16% of the children ever got the severe spotting inside the mouth that characterizes the typical disease.