A medical doctor, Weller studied communicable diseases, how they spread, and how to prevent them. In the 1940s, the world was terrified by a pandemic of a communicable disease: polio, which caused paralysis and death, and especially affected children.
There was a race to come up with a vaccine against the disease, but that needed a breakthrough, and in 1948 Weller, working with John Enders and Frederick Robbins at Children’s Hospital in Boston, provided it: they figured out how to grow poliovirus in the laboratory, which gave other researchers the material needed to develop the vaccine.
Jonas Salk introduced the first, and Albert Sabin shortly followed on with one that was even more effective; together, the two vaccines virtually eradicated polio. Weller and his two colleagues shared the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work. Weller went on to work on other viruses, especially those which plagued children, including measles and chicken pox. He spent the rest of his career heading the department of tropical medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Weller died August 23 at age 93.