Frederick Chapman Robbins was born in 1916, in Auburn, Alabama. He was the eldest of three boys born to Dr. William Jacob Robbins and Christine F. (Chapman) Robbins. His father was a noted plant physiologist and was director of the New York Botanical Garden. As a medical student at Harvard University, Robbins roomed with Thomas Weller and studied virology under John F. Enders, the men with whom he would later share the Nobel Prize. Service in World War II interrupted his residency at Children's Hospital in Boston, but it provided the opportunity to study viruses and bacterial diseases. In 1948, Robbins married Alice Havemeyer Northrop, who had been Weller's assistant in the Enders laboratory.

That year, Robbins went to work in Enders's lab. Concentrating on pediatrics, he and Weller attempted to grow poliomyelitis in embryonic and intestinal tissue. Prior to this time, polio had only been shown to grow in...