The Biologist/Poet & the Poet/Biologist

Abstract

I remember John Enders’ obituary in Nature magazine because of the way it begins. F.S. Rosen (1985) writes that Enders died unexpectedly at the age of 87 just as he had finished reading a volume of T.S. Eliot’s poems. Rosen seems to consider this a particularly fitting ending for someone who, though he had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1954 for discovering how to grow the polio virus in culture, had begun his academic career with graduate study in English literature. Enders was deflected from this path because his roommate was a student of the microbiologist Hans Zinsser, and it was Zinsser who reawakened Enders’ early interest in biology. Enders ended up working in Zinsser’s lab and getting a doctorate in microbiology for research on the tuberculosis bacterium.