Robbins, Frederick Chapman

Robbins, Frederick Chapman, 1916–2003, American physician, b. Auburn, Ala., grad. Univ. of Missouri, 1938, M.D. Harvard, 1940. He served on the staff of Children's Hospital, Boston, and at Harvard, and from 1952 to 1966 was director of pediatrics at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital. At Case Western Reserve Univ. he served as professor of pediatrics (1952–80), dean of the medical school (1966–80), and university professor (1980–87). He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with J. F. Enders and T. H. Weller for their work in growing polio viruses in cultures of different tissues, a breakthrough that enabled the development of polio and other vaccines and that had great significance in the development of virology and cell biology.

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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.