After joining Enders and Weller at the Children's Hospital, Boston, in 1948, Robbins helped solve the difficult problem of propagating viruses--then known to grow only in living organisms--in laboratory suspensions of actively metabolizing cells in nutrient solutions. At that time it was believed that the virus responsible for poliomyelitis grew and multiplied only in mammalian nerve tissue, which is highly insusceptible to maintenance outside the living animal. By 1952 Robbins and his colleagues had succeeded in cultivating the virus in mixtures of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue suspended in cell cultures, dramatically demonstrating that the polio virus subsists in extraneural tissue, only later attacking the lower part of the brain and sections of the spinal cord. Robbins served as director of the department of pediatrics and contagious
diseases at the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital (1952-66) and
as professor of pediatrics (1952-80) and dean (1966-80) at the Case
Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio.
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