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"My Spirits Fail." He came late to the field he has made intuitively his own. John Franklin Enders was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1897, the son of a banker and grandson of a founder of Aetna Life Insurance Co. He has a childhood memory of Mark Twain, a friend of the family, coming to call in a characteristic white suit. From St. Paul's, where he rowed in the crew, played hockey and football. Enders went to Yale, only to have his education interrupted by World War I. He joined the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, became a flight instructor in a pontoon plane with a 50-h.p. engine.
After getting an A.B. at Yale, he briefly tried selling real estate (he flopped), went to Harvard to try for a Ph.D. in English. He started a thesis on the origin of genders, worked two years before he found that a student at Heidelberg had long since done the subject with unimprovable thoroughness. "I mouth the strange syllables of ten forgotten languages, letting my spirits fail, my youth pass," he youthfully wrote. Then a roommate, Australian Bacteriologist Hugh Ward, introduced John Enders to Hans Zinsser, Harvard University's professor of bacteriology and immunology, and one of the great fertilizing minds of his era (Rats, Lice and History for the layman. Infection and Resistance for the profession). Enders was then 30. "A man of superlative energy," Enders wrote of Zinsser after their first meeting at a hard-cider party: "A golden heart and sufficient intelligence."
Zinsser told Enders that if he would work up his chemistry and physics in the summer, he could have a laboratory assignment in the fall. Enders did not leap at the offer; he moves too thoughtfully and slowly for that. But he took it. In May 1928 he wrote to a friend: "This antipodal revolution of my studies has been of large value in helping me to obtain that Pisgah* sight of things and people that perhaps is the ultimate aim of my apparently inconsistent, faltering and obscure action." In 1930, at the age of 33, Enders got a Ph.D. in microbiology with a thesis on anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction).
Through the Filter. Enders worked at first on tuberculosis and bacterial pneumonia. But in the early '30s there was growing awareness of the importance of smaller infectious particles, so small that, with negligible exceptions, they were invisible to medical researchers under even the strongest microscopes.
Edward Jenner had found, before 1800, an empirical method of protecting man against one dread disease now known to be caused by a virus: infection with cowpox ("vaccinia," hence the general term vaccination) would ward off later infection with the deadly and disfiguring smallpox (so called to distinguish it from syphilis, "the great pox"). Louis Pasteur achieved a similar triumph of empiricism. Unable to isolate the microbe of rabies, he simply assumed that it was too small to be seen and developed the Pasteur treatment for victims of bites by rabid animals.