The Nobel Prize of $28,086 awarded by the Caroline Institute followed on only somewhat less distinguished recognition. In June of 1953, Enders received the Passano, and last tall he was cited for "distinguished achievements in the cultivation of viruses," and given the Lasker Foundation Aware. Finally, last October he was sitting in his office being quizzed over the telephone by the Boston Globe's suspicious science writer, Frances Burns when word first come through that he and his two associated would receive the outstanding science award of the year. "Wait a second," Miss Burns said. "It's coming over the AP wire. You've won the Nobel Prize."

The announcement was the climax but only a temporary one, to a story of three men one each from the Sough, West, and east all of whom came to Harvard to work with its Medical School.

A graduate of St. Paul's School and Yale, Enders took his Ph.D. in Bacteriology at the graduate School of Arts and Sciences during an era, as he says, when "there weren't very many men who took that sort of a degree." In 1930 he won his Doctorate and simultaneously became an instructor in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. He had risen to the position of assistant professor by the time he was teaching a young sophomore medical student named Weller in 1937.

Weller and Robbins

Weller had come east from Michigan, where his father is now chairman of the department of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School. With him in the class of 1940 was a dark-haired Frederick Robbins from Auburn, Alabama.

In 1946, the Children's Hospital jointed with several other units to form the Children's Medical center, the Board of Trustees created a new division of Laboratories and Research. Enders received and accepted in 1947 an offer to direct one of the units, the Laboratories of Infections Disease Research.

Cramped Laboratory

With Weller, who had just finished his residency at Children's Hospital as his assistant, Enders set up the laboratory on the second floor of the old Carnegie Building behind the hospital. Space was so much in demand that they had designate the hallway for their reception room in order to leave space for installing experimental animals. The two then set to work on experiments to cultivate the mumps and inbuenza viruses with which Enders had worked before the War. While in the process of working on these attempts at cultivation, the two decided to try to isolate and grow the polio virus.

"We thought we would make another attempt at growing it," Enders explained later. "There was nothing new about tissue culture of virus, but it seemed to us the possibilities had not been adequately explored. Almost all the virus work had been carried on in susceptible animals like mice, monkeys, and pigs. But scientists had never found it practical. But scientists had never found it practical to work with animals in the case of polio, and nearly all attempts to apply test-tube growth to any kind of virus had failed."

Enders and Weller did know, however, that at least one virus chicken-pox-had bten grown in a test-tube. And the polio virus, was, they noted, similar in many ways to chicken-pox.

They also knew that if they could grow the polio virus in sufficient quantities, it could be neutralized with formaldehyde, and used to produced antibodies--which would combat any polio germs in an inoculated person.

"It seemed worthwhile to try again," Enders reflected, "and amazingly enough what we tried seemed to work!"

Proviously, all attempts at growing the virus has centered around the impractical use of infected monkey brain as culture material. But, as there seemed to be strong evidence that polio grew in the body as well as the brain, the two men decided to try to grow the virus on ordinary human skin cells. This reasoning seemed to be a logical step, especially since the chicken-pox had been grown with human tissue.

Infected Saliva

"We had a sure way of telling if the virus would grow," Enders pointed out later, "because we found that when it did multiply it killed the living cells of the skin. It is very easy to tell under a microscope whether or not cells are dead."