Thomas Huckle Weller was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 15th, 1915. He was educated at the public schools there, and later at the University of Michigan, where his father, Carl Vernon Weller had an appointment in the Pathology Department of the Medical School. Entering this University in 1932, T. H. Weller graduated in 1936, taking the A.B. degree. Early in life he had shown an interest in natural history, and this no doubt influenced him during his University life in the direction of medical zoology. He was also influenced in this direction by Professors G. R. LaRue, and A. E. Woodhead and, after his graduation, he worked for two summers at the University of Michigan Biological Station under Professors L. J. Thomas and W. W. Cort on the parasites of fish. In 1937 he was awarded the M.S. degree for this work.

In 1936, however, he had entered the Harvard Medical School in Boston and there he was given, by Drs. E. E. Tyzzer and Donald L. Augustine, facilities for research in the Department of Comparative Medicine and Tropical Medicine. His experiences under the direction of these two distinguished parasitologists, whose outstanding discoveries in protozoology and helminthology are well-known, must have been very valuable

The course of much of Weller's later work was, nevertheless, influenced by the fact that he was accepted, in 1939, as a tutorial student by Dr. J. F. Enders, who introduced him to the field of virus research and to the study of tissue-culture techniques as a means of studying the causes of infectious disease. In 1940 he took his M.D. degree and began his clinical training at the Children's Hospital in Boston. His work here was, however, interrupted by military service in the Second World War, for he joined, in 1942, the Army Medical Corps and was stationed at the Antilles Medical Laboratory in Puerto Rico for 32 months. There he was Head of the Departments of Bacteriology, Virology and Parasitology and attained the rank of Major. He then returned to the Children's Hospital, Boston, for a further year of clinical training and, in 1947, he joined Dr. Enders in the organization of the new, Research Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Medical Centre.

In 1949 he was appointed Assistant Director of this Division and subsequently held the appointments of Instructor in the Department of Comparative Pathology and Tropical Medicine, and Associate Professor in the Harvard Medical School of Public Health. In July, 1954, he was appointed Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Tropical Public Health and Head of the Department at the Harvard School of Public Health.

In his researches, Weller was interested, partly in the helminth parasites of man, and partly in virology. In helminthology he contributed to the literature on the nematode Trichirella spiralis and also to that on the schistosome trematodes which cause schistosomiasis of man, his contributions including methods of cultivating the schistosomes in vitro and modifications of methods for the recovery and counting of the eggs of these parasites.

In virology his studies of varicella and herpes zoster resulted in his isolation for the first time of the viruses responsible for these diseases, and also in the development of diagnostic tests and in the demonstration that the same virus apparently causes both these diseases. In 1955 he also isolated the virus which causes cytomegalic inclusion disease in infants and, after working for five years on these diseases, he was able to show that the human foetus, while it is in the uterus, is particularly susceptible to attack by these viruses and that, if the foetus survives attack by them, the infant is often born with severe damage to its brain which causes mental retardation and cerebral palsy. Weller's subsequent work has included studies of the Coxsackie viruses as causes of epidemic pleurodynia and on the behaviour of Toxoplasma gondii in tissue culture. He is also studying the propagation in vitro of the viruses that cause varicella and herpes zoster.

In addition to the appointments already mentioned, Weller served, from 1953 till 1959, as Director of the Commission on Parasitic Diseases of the American Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.

In 1945 he married Kathleen Fahey and they have two sons, Peter Fahey and Robert Andrew, and two daughters, Janet Louise and Nancy Kathleen.

From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1942-1962.