Frederick Chapman Robbins

Robbins, Frederick Chapman 

Born Aug. 25, 1916, in Auburn, Ala. American virologist. Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Robbins graduated from the University of Missouri in 1936 and from the Harvard Medical School in 1940. From 1940 to 1942 and from 1948 to 1950 he was a staff member of the Children’s Hospital in Boston. From 1952 to 1966 he was head of the department of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital. In 1952, Robbins joined the faculty of the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland as a professor of pediatrics; he became dean in 1966.

In Boston, Robbins, J. Enders, and T. Weller discovered a technique for growing the poliomyelitis virus in tissue cultures, for which they shared a Nobel Prize in 1954. Robbins helped develop vaccines against poliomyelitis and methods for determining and isolating a number of other viruses. He studied the epidemiology of infectious hepatitis, typhus, and Q fever.