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Virology Division News
Obituary In Memoriam Joseph Louis Melnick (1914–2001)
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oseph L. Melnick, one of the four founders of the Virology Division of the International Union of Microbiological Societies, passed away on Sunday, January 7, 2001, at the age of 86. His lifelong contribution to the discipline of virology was enormous, and when he died he was a Distinguished Service Professor of Molecular Virology and Microbiology and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA. Born in Boston, Joe was educated at Wesleyan University and at Yale, where he began to study physiological chemistry, and received his PhD degree in 1939 for work on carboxylase enzymes in brewer’s yeast. He published his first scientific paper in 1941, and went on to write more than 1000 virology papers that were quoted so often that in 1978 he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 37th most cited scientist in the world scientific literature, with 7,466 citations, 1961 to 1978. Joe also authored a popular undergraduate microbiology text called Review of Medical Virology, which ran to 18 editions (1953-1989), reached a million copies in English, and was translated into no less than 12 foreign languages for use by medical students in their respective countries. In 1941, Dr Melnick was invited to join the laboratory of Dr John Paul, a renowned epidemiologist at Yale, as the basic scientist of a group funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes) to conduct research on poliomyelitis. This was a time when Max Theiler (who later received a Nobel Prize for developing yellow fever vaccine) was working at the Rockefeller University and first demonstrated the existence of murine polioviruses. Joe went to the Rockefeller to learn all he could about these murine viruses, and then set up a basic virology research laboratory at Yale, where he remained for the next 16 years. He was one of the first virologists to demonstrate that even though poliovirus could multiply in the nervous system, it usually caused gastrointestinal infections and only rarely caused poliomyelitis. He detected poliovirus in New York sewage in the 1940’s, and from this work grew the whole field of environmental virology. He became closely involved in early developmental work on poliovirus vaccines, and was elected to the Polio Hall of Fame in 1958. He became a world expert on human enteroviruses, and made seminal contributions to the field of viral hepatitis, including the first sizing of serum
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Virology Division News
hepatitis (Hepatitis B virus) using gradocol membranes, as well as many studies on infectious hepatitis (Hepatitis A virus). It was during this period at Yale that Joe became seriously interested in taxonomy and classification of viruses. In 1955, he was asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Puna, India, to introduce tissue culture technology at the Virus Research Centre there. During this year he had the opportunity to investigate one of
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