John Franklin Enders, Form of 1915

Deeds Well Done

John Franklin Enders of the Form of 1915 excelled in the humanities at St. Paul’s School. He went on to become one of the 20th century’s foremost scientists — and the School’s only Nobel laureate.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

Earlier this year, as COVID-19 and monkeypox vied for headlines across the United States, another infectious disease slipped back into the news: poliomyelitis, better known as polio, which began turning up in wastewater samples in New York City — decades after being declared effectively vanquished.

For most, polio conjures a few specific images, in the stark black and white style of a LIFE magazine photo essay: children in iron lungs, their smiles wide despite the metal chambers that encase their bodies; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, projecting a vigor that belies his wheelchair and the braces on his legs. But for those who knew him, polio calls to mind a different man entirely, soft-spoken and stoop-shouldered, toiling away over test tubes in a modest laboratory at Harvard Medical School.

John Enders, a member of the St. Paul’s School Form of 1915, didn’t contract polio, nor is his name immediately tied to the vaccines developed in the mid-20th century that led to the near-eradication of the illness across the globe. But those vaccines — the inactivated polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in 1955 and the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin five years later — were critically dependent on a discovery that Enders made in his Harvard lab in the late 1940s, as were many vaccines that followed it. The SPS alumnus developed a cell culture technique that made it possible to grow polio virus in abundance, in a test tube. Indeed, the discovery by Enders ushered in what many in infectious disease describe as a “golden age” of vaccines, and it earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine that today is housed in the place where Enders began to chart his course for a life of intellectual discovery, the grounds of St. Paul’s School.

A WAY OF LIFE

Enders didn’t set out to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In fact, he didn’t set out to be a scientist at all. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1897, John Franklin Enders was the eldest of four children in a prominent family with only peripheral ties to medicine — he had an uncle who was a physician — but extensive ties to the business world. His grandfather, Thomas O. Enders, was a Hartford banker who later established the Aetna Life Insurance Company; in the late 1920s, his father, John Ostrom Enders, oversaw a series of banking mergers that created the Hartford National Bank and Trust Co. According to a biography of Enders published by the National Academy of Sciences, the bank’s clients included Samuel Clemens — the American humorist better known by his pen name, Mark Twain — “whose spotless white suits impressed the young [Enders] when the famous author visited.”

The first of his family to attend St. Paul’s (his brother Ostrom followed six years later), Enders was drawn to the humanities, studying Latin, French, German, and English literature and, according to his own account, struggling with math and sciences: “In mathematics and physics,” his National Academy of Sciences biography quotes him as saying, “I encountered difficulties which were surmounted in a most mediocre fashion only after great effort.” He was a member of the Missionary Society, played football and rowed with the first Shattuck boat, and as a Fifth Former wrote a poem that provided some early insight into his character, asking in part:

When I am old/And spindle shanks and sunken chaps/Betoken the coming of the fearful Last Event/What memories of youth will come to steel my heart/ Against the fear of meeting with my Creator?/Will then my heart be strong with thoughts of Deeds well done?

After St. Paul’s, Enders went to Yale to study English, leaving in 1917 to become a Navy pilot and returning after World War I to complete his degree. He graduated in 1920, and after a brief stint in real estate, headed back to academia with the intent of earning a Ph.D. in English literature and becoming a teacher. He’d completed his master’s at Harvard and was three years into a doctoral thesis on philology when one of his roommates, an instructor in Harvard’s department of bacteriology and immunology, introduced him to his department head, Hans Zinsser.

Out of sheer curiosity, Enders had begun to accompany his roommate to his laboratory in the evenings and, intrigued, started to question whether he was on the right academic path. Meeting Zinsser tipped the balance. Like Enders, Zinsser came from a humanities background, and had published poetry in The Atlantic Monthly. The bacteriologist’s capacity for standing simultaneously in the seemingly disparate realms of medicine and literature opened a whole new world of possibilities to Enders, who later wrote of his soon-to-be mentor, “Literature, politics, history, and science — all he discussed with spontaneity and without self-consciousness… . Voltaire seemed just around the corner, and Laurence Sterne upon the stair… . Under such influences, the laboratory became much more than a place just to work and teach; it became a way of life.”

Enders earned his Ph.D. in bacteriology under Zinsser in 1930 and spent the early years of his research career at Harvard studying bacteria. He expanded his study to include mammalian viruses in 1938 and, in 1941, partnered with half a dozen other researchers to study the viral illness mumps. Five years later, he was asked to establish a laboratory dedicated to infectious disease research at Children’s Medical Center in Boston, now Boston Children’s Hospital. It was there, working with research fellows Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, that he discovered and refined the laboratory cultivation technique for polio virus that made it possible for Jonas Salk to develop the first vaccine against the disease.

A CRITICAL BREAKTHROUGH

Today, it’s hard to fathom the significance of Enders’ achievement — on any number of levels. A highly contagious virus that attaches itself to cells in the intestinal tract and attacks the nervous system, in the late 1940s polio infected between 35,000 and 60,000 Americans every year, causing symptoms that ranged from fevers and neck pain to irreversible paralysis or death. The seriously ill ended up in iron lungs — mechanical respirators that supported the physical processes required for breathing — often for the rest of their lives. And while it had been more than 150 years since British scientist Edward Jenner had developed the first “modern” vaccine against smallpox, which he achieved by inoculating an 8-year-old boy with active cowpox virus, in 1949 no one had yet figured out how to grow the polio virus — or any virus — in a laboratory. Building off the 1931 work of Ernest Goodpasture, who had succeeded in growing pox viruses in the chorioallantoic membrane of embryonated eggs, Enders’ experiments represented a crucial step toward developing a vaccine against the disease.

“Growing viruses is complicated,” says Peter Wright ’60, an infectious diseases specialist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center who worked with Enders at the end of his career and has dedicated much of his own to researching vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus. “Viruses aren’t alive, so they require some sort of host, and the right media and conditions to allow them to replicate.”

Advances like the mRNA technology used to develop vaccines against COVID-19, Wright notes, make the ability to grow viruses less necessary today than it was 80 years ago, but the success of Enders in growing polio in a test tube using human tissue was groundbreaking — and a perhaps inevitable extension of his background in bacteriology. By using antibiotics, Wright explains, Enders was able to kill off other microbes that contaminated cell cultures and competed for nutrients, leaving the viruses to grow freely.

“That breakthrough allowed for the development of vaccines not just for polio, but also for measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox,” he says.

Also hard to fathom is the stance Enders took regarding the Nobel itself. Frederick Lovejoy ’55 was the chief resident at Boston Children’s Hospital and then a junior faculty member in pediatrics during Enders’ tenure. He says it was common knowledge that Enders initially refused to accept his Nobel Prize unless his two researchers, then early in their academic careers, shared in the award.

“When the Nobel committee called him from Sweden, he said, ‘thank you for the honor, but I’m not going to accept the prize unless my research fellows receive it, too,’” Lovejoy recalls. “They told him they didn’t think that was possible — that wasn’t how it worked — and he told them that he understood, and they could give it to someone else.’ And later they called him back and let him know they were going to award the Nobel Prize to him, Weller, and Robbins.”