Thomas Weller; Shared Nobel for Polio Work

Thomas H. Weller, 93, the physician and researcher who shared a Nobel Prize for work vital to the development of vaccines against polio, died Aug. 23 at his home in Needham, Mass. The family did not disclose the cause of death.

At the time of his death, Dr. Weller was a professor emeritus at the Harvard University School of Public Health.

Dr. Weller and his Harvard Medical School collaborators, John F. Enders and Frederick C. Robbins, demonstrated almost 60 years ago how to produce the supply of polio virus that was needed for developing and manufacturing a vaccine against the disease.

Polio virus, in killed or weakened form, is the most important component of polio vaccine.

Dr. Weller and his collaborators received the 1954 Nobel in physiology or medicine.

With their achievement, said Sven Gard, the Swedish professor who formally presented the prize, "a new epoch in the history of virus research had started."

Before the 1949 breakthrough, which showed how to cultivate the virus in test tubes, scientists believed it could be grown only in the nerve tissue of live monkeys.

So impractical was this technique that specialists despaired of finding a way to shield populations against the infectious menace that struck without warning, had crippled President Franklin D. Roosevelt and left others unable to walk, or even breathe, unaided.

Those who developed the vaccines that eliminated the terrors of polio became far better known than those whose work made immunization possible. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed vaccines for the disease in the early 1950s.

Nevertheless, as shown by the Nobel Prize, Dr. Weller and his collaborators were regarded as major figures in medicine. Just as polio appeared to represent danger and hazard, the vaccine seemed to stand for progress and possibility.

The work of Dr. Weller and the others was deemed essential to the struggle against viral disease. Beginning in the early 1950s, he was credited with being one of the first to isolate the viruses that cause chickenpox and shingles, as well as cytomegalovirus and rubella, or German measles.

Important work leading to the isolation of the German measles virus was conducted on specimens taken from his son Robert, who as a boy contracted a serious illness that had characteristics of German measles. This, Dr. Weller wrote, followed four unsuccessful attempts to find the virus after outbreaks of the disease in schools.