Samuel L. Katz, Measles Vaccine Developer, Dies at 95 – Chicago Tribune

Dr. Samuel L. Katz, a virologist who was part of the Harvard Medical School research team that developed the measles vaccine, an achievement more than half a century ago that saved countless lives, died Oct. 31 at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was 95.

His son David confirmed the death.

Katz later strengthened the reputation of the Department of Pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine as chairman.

Katz began fighting measles in 1956 when he joined the laboratory at Children’s Hospital Medical Center (now Boston Children’s Hospital) directed by Dr. John Enders. Two years earlier, Enders had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering ways to grow the polio virus in cultures, a breakthrough that was critical to Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine, which led to widespread successful immunization.

Enders’ laboratory had already isolated the measles virus from a 13-year-old boy when Katz arrived there as a research assistant. Measles was a major medical threat at the time: in the decade before the vaccine became available in 1963, nearly every child in the United States under the age of 15 had measles, with 3 to 4 million infected each year person, leading to an estimated 400 to 500 deaths annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The World Health Organization said 2.6 million people died worldwide in the year before measles vaccines were available.

“I was assigned to work with a visitor from Yugoslavia, Milan Milovanovic, who taught me many practical exercises,” Katz told the Dartmouth Medicine alumni magazine in 2009. “We worked together to adapt the virus into different cell systems and into eggs and eventually into chicken embryo cells,” a process that weakened the virus so that it could stimulate an immune response without causing serious side effects.

Katz participated in the rhesus monkey virus vaccination.

“And when we injected the chicken pox virus into the monkeys, they didn’t develop viremia” — the virus in the blood — “they didn’t develop fever, they didn’t develop any nasal congestion or conjunctivitis or rash, they were completely normal,” he said. on the Infectious Diseases Open Forum podcast in 2014. “But they developed antibodies.”

The chicken virus was administered to students at a public school for children with neurological and central nervous system problems, a group whose use in the laboratory reflected a time of looser ethical standards for test subjects.

“At the end of a few weeks, they developed antibodies to the measles virus,” Katz recalled.

He became a research associate at the laboratory in 1958 and retained that title for the next decade, during which he was also a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Katz played two other prominent roles in the development of the measles vaccine. In one, he collaborated with pharmaceutical firms that wanted to produce a vaccine.

“He was forever sending vials of virus to Merck and other companies,” I. George Miller Jr., a professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine who joined the lab in 1961, said in a telephone interview. “He was kind of good humored for vaccines.”

In another role, at the request of British pediatrician David Morley, Katz brought a prototype vaccine to Nigeria in 1961 to immunize children who were highly susceptible to measles because their systems were weakened by malaria, worms, vitamin A deficiency, and protein depletion.

Nigerian parents are used to losing their children to measles; they had a 5% to 15% mortality rate when they got the virus. While there, Katz recalled on the Open Forum podcast, he heard people say, “You don’t count your kids until the measles is gone.”

There, he vaccinated the children in the village, they developed immunity.

The measles vaccine was licensed in 1963 and soon became widely available; eight years later, it was included in the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

Samuel Lawrence Katz was born on May 29, 1927 in Manchester, New Hampshire. His father, Maurice, was a railroad executive; his mother, Ethel (Lawrence) Katz, was a homemaker.

He entered Dartmouth College in 1944, hoping to become a journalist. His interest in medicine changed a year later when he enlisted in the Navy and was sent to hospital school in San Diego.

He returned to Dartmouth after the war and received a BA in political science in 1948. He also took the pre-medical courses required to enter Dartmouth’s then two-year medical school. He graduated with a BA in 1950 and from Harvard Medical School in 1952.

After his internship at Beth Israel, he was a resident at Children’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. While there, he witnessed an outbreak of polio in the summer of 1955, the year Salk’s vaccine became available.

That summer, he worked in a hospital in the polio wards, seeing firsthand the ravages of the disease. When the crisis subsided, he asked permission to work with Enders.

“All the time we were working in the lab — with viruses, with cell cultures, with blood samples, with potential vaccines,” Katz said in the podcast — Enders was giving these materials to anyone who visited the lab and was a legitimate investigator. .”

In 1968, Katz left Harvard and transferred to Duke University School of Medicine. During his 22 years as head of the Department of Pediatrics, he helped raise its national profile.

Afternoon briefing

Every day

Top articles from Chicago Tribune editors delivered to your inbox every day.

“He had such a command of virology and clinical practice and was very positive,” Dr. Mary Klotman, dean of Duke’s medical school, said in a telephone interview. “He has been a role model for integrating science, clinical care and mentoring the next generation of clinicians.”

In 1990, Katz resigned as Duke’s chief of pediatrics to work with his second wife, Dr. Kathryn Wilfert, an HIV/AIDS researcher, activist and professor of pediatrics at the Duke School of Medicine. She was the principal investigator in a pediatric AIDS clinical trial that began in 1987 and showed the drug AZT was effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV by more than 60%.

Wilfert left Duke in 1996 to become scientific director of the Elizabeth Glaser Childhood AIDS Foundation. Katz continued to teach at Duke until his retirement in 2017.

In addition to his son David, he is survived by two other sons, John and William; five daughters: Deborah Miora, Susan Calderon, Penelope Katz Faher, Rachel Wilfert and Kathy Regen; and 17 grandchildren. His marriage to Betsy Cohan ended in divorce. His marriage to Wilfert ended in her death in 2020. His son, Samuel Jr., died in 1980.

Katz became a prominent vaccine advocate. He was chairman of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from 1985 to 1993 and a 2003 recipient of the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal, which is awarded to public health leaders who save lives with vaccines. The medal is named after the doctor who developed the oral polio vaccine.

“He was someone you could count on for intellectual rigor, who never panicked and wanted to do what was best in the field,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said in an interview. . He added: “I’m sure he’ll have doubts because of the anti-vaccine activism that’s causing people to refuse the COVID vaccine.”

To purchase a death notice, visit https://placeanad.chicagotribune.com/death-notices/. To suggest a staff-written obituary for a person of local interest, please email chicagoland@chicagotribune.com