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25 AUGUST 1916 * 4 AUGUST 2003
FREDERICK CHAPMAN ROBBINS, an international leader in virology, pediatrics, infectious diseases, vaccinology, epidemiology, and health policy, died on 4 August 2003, three weeks before his eighty-seventh birthday. The 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology had been awarded in 1954 to the trio of Fred Robbins, Tom Weller, and their senior mentor, John Enders, for their work demonstrating the growth of polioviruses in cell culture systems. Their results not only paved the way for the development of poliovirus vaccines by Jonas SaIk and Albert Sabin, but opened an entirely new vista to the field of virology, enabling the discovery, growth, and study of hundreds of viruses never previously available for laboratory exploration. Robbins was only thirty-three years old at the time of the first publication of these successful studies.
Born in Auburn, Alabama, he soon moved with his family to Columbia, Missouri, where he spent most of his childhood and his early adult years. He attended the University of Missouri, from which he received his A.B. in 1936 and, after two years in its medical school, a B.S. in 1938, which enabled him to complete his medical studies at Harvard in 1940. As a Missouri undergraduate he had won awards for his horsemanship and for polo, but there is no mention of further equine achievements thereafter. At Harvard Medical School his roommate was Thomas H. Weller, whom he later rejoined as a research fellow in the Enders laboratory. Upon graduation from Harvard Medical School, he spent a year as resident in bacteriology at Boston's Children's Hospital, followed by an internship in medicine (pediatrics) at the same institution. The course of his pediatrics residency training was interrupted by World War II; he joined the armed forces and served in North Africa and Italy as director of a diagnostic microbiology laboratory where his studies included hepatitis, typhus, and Q fever. Upon discharge in 1946 he was awarded the Bronze Star. He returned to Children's Hospital, where he completed his residency...