John Franklin Enders was born in West Hartford, Connecticut February 10, 1887. He attended Yale for a short time before entering the United States Air Force in 1918. After returning from war he graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Scroll and Key, and went on to become a businessman in the area of real estate in 1922. He tried his hand at a few different careers before choosing to work in the biological field studying infectious diseases. Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue". John Franklin Enders died in 1985.
Enders could then expand his own research on mumps, and with additional funding from military sources, he was able for the first time to employ a personal technician and a succession of junior associates.
Enders and Dr. Alfred L. Florman then investigated the influence of antiserum and complement on the growth of vaccinia virus in roller cultures and the persistence of this virus in Maitland-type cultures.
Enders immediately turned all the resources of his laboratory to the task of developing a measles vaccine based on the attenuated, avianized strain, and the results of their labors were published in a series of papers in the New England Journal of Medicine's July 28, 1960 issue.
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