Frederick Chapman Robbins

Born in Auburn, Alabama in 1916 and raised in Columbia, Missouri, Robbins attended the University of Missouri and Harvard before training as a pediatrician and virologist. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside John Franklin Enders and Thomas Huckle Weller for isolating and growing poliovirus in tissue culture, the breakthrough that made mass vaccination possible. Two years earlier he'd joined Case Western Reserve University as a professor of pediatrics, eventually serving as dean of the medical school from 1966 to 1980. He became president of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine in 1980, then returned to Case Western in 1985 as dean emeritus and distinguished professor emeritus, a fixture there until his death in 2003. His wife Alice was the daughter of Nobel laureate John Howard Northrop; she outlived him by thirteen years.