Measles: Practice Essentials, Background, Pathophysiology

Measles, Myths And More: Fighting False Claims In Disease Control

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Measles In Maryland: What To Know As The State Now Has Three Cases

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The Measles Vaccine, Developed At Boston Children's Hospital, Spared Millions From Misery

Miller could have hardly imagined in those feverish hours that a pioneering Boston scientist would create a vaccine to spare countless other children from the misery he was experiencing. Nor did he envision that the scientist, Dr. John Enders, would one day become his own mentor, opening the door to a remarkable career in science for Miller as well.

Enders conducted this extraordinary research at Boston Children's Hospital (then known as Children's Hospital Medical Center) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Miller was in his senior year at Harvard Medical School in 1961 when he was introduced to Enders. A few years before, Enders had won the Nobel Prize for trailblazing work that allowed Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine against another childhood scourge: polio.

Thanks to Enders' work on vaccines, measles, one of the world's most contagious viruses, was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. And yet today, it is making a resurgence: More than 370 confirmed cases have been reported this year in 17 states, with most of them, at least 325, from an outbreak in Texas where nearly all were either unvaccinated or their vaccination status is unknown.

Most are children and at least 40 patients have been hospitalized. One child in Texas has died, the first death from measles in the US in over a decade.

The rapidly spreading outbreak comes as vaccination rates in general among children are declining nationwide amid a rising tide of misinformation and mistrust in such long-respected public health measures.

Miller, now a few weeks shy of 88 and a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Yale School of Medicine, is keenly aware of the current political tensions around vaccines. He politely declines to wade in. But, asked what Enders might have thought of the waning vaccination rates and measles outbreak, Miller paused, then said: "I'm sure that he would have felt the measles vaccine was a good vaccine, and people should use it."

For millennia, scientific discoveries have been carried forward and built upon as the acolytes of one generation nurture and then pass their insights to the next. Now, that time-honored progression is at risk of fraying under a barrage of Trump administration actions that have slashed hundreds of millions of dollars for medical research, led universities to cut back on graduate admissions and PhD slots, and censored research into a wide array of areas including vaccinations.

The story of the measles vaccine, the research behind it, and the generational legacy it spawned is one of the clearest cases of this long arc in science.

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Not even three months into 2025, the United States has already passed the amount of measles cases it saw in all of last year.

Enders, originally an unhappy language major in graduate school at Harvard, only became fascinated with science after tagging along with a friend to a lab, and meeting a charismatic immunology researcher and professor, Hans Zinsser, who became his mentor in the late 1920s.

By the 1940s, Enders was absorbed by learning different techniques to grow viruses in the lab. Then in 1949, Enders and colleagues Frederick Robbins and Thomas Weller successfully grew the polio virus by pioneering a technique that made it much easier and faster to reproduce viruses than had been used by scientists.

Shortly after, Jonas Salk used the Enders' team technique to create the polio vaccine now widely associated with Salk, which was licensed in 1955.

By then, Enders' team, working to build on their colleagues' success with polio, had isolated the measles virus from a schoolboy, David Edmonston, from a 1954 outbreak in a boarding school near Boston. They used a method similar to the one Enders employed in his Nobel-winning polio work to grow measles virus in tissue in the lab.

A front-page 1959 Boston Globe headline captured the excitement of the measles breakthrough. "Safe, Effective Measles Vaccine Found in Tests on Children Here," proclaimed the story, which said that adult volunteers at Children's Hospital took the vaccine before it was tried on 11 Boston-area children. After further successful trials, a September 1961 New York Times article declared, "Dr. Enders' second triumph over a major disease will be hailed everywhere as one of the greatest achievements of medicine."

And yet, even when Miller first met Enders in 1961, the lab at Children's still occupied four rooms in an old building in Longwood Medical Area.

The measles vaccine would be licensed two years later, and the vaccine available today contains the same strain of virus isolated by the Enders team so many decades ago. Enders' technique for growing viruses made it possible for many scientists to later develop other common vaccines on a large scale.

Years later, after Enders' death in 1985, Miller was going through his late mentor's papers and discovered a trove of letters from pharmaceutical companies asking for batches of the measles virus to help them create additional measles vaccines. Enders and his colleagues, Miller learned, were just giving away copies of the virus, mailing samples to help out other scientists.

"There wasn't the era of intellectual property," Miller said. "They didn't harvest any money from measles or from the polio."

Enders, a modest man with a magnetic personality, an unquenchable curiosity, and a penchant for wearing vests, was affectionately called "Chief" by his lab colleagues. He was thrifty by nature, packing his lunch daily, but was known to lavish time on his students, asking about their lives, as well as their research. Miller bonded with him over their shared passion for fishing.

Fishing, said Miller, is an apt metaphor for the work scientists do. "We catch surprises," he said.

Miller spent just four months during that stretch in Enders' lab learning how to handle viruses before heading to Cleveland for a residency in internal medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

But those four months sparked his interest in using science to fight disease. That, and the country's launch in 1964 of a military draft for its expanding war in Vietnam, inspired Miller to enroll in an alternative: a program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help vaccinate thousands of children against measles in Panama and Africa.

"It's the story of my life," Miller said of his opportunity to use a vaccine his mentor created to vaccinate so many children against a disease often lethal in developing countries.

His time in Panama's remote Veraguas province stands out.

"You had to take a horse up there. The roads weren't passable," he said. "We'd show up at this site that had been established for vaccination against measles. And these mothers would come with their babies. They may have walked for three days to get it."

Miller returned to Enders lab in the late 1960s for about three years of post-doctoral research working on the Epstein-Barr virus, a common virus that causes mononucleosis or "mono." At Enders' suggestion, Miller coaxed the virus to grow indefinitely in a cell and then demonstrated that such an "immortalized" Epstein-Barr virus can turn cancerous, paving the way for researchers today who are linking some viruses to cancer, such as the human papillomaviruses, or HPV, link to cervical cancer, or Hepatitis B and liver cancer.

Soon after, Miller was recruited to Yale School of Medicine, where his groundbreaking Epstein-Barr research continues to fuel his life's work.

Mindful of the extraordinary opportunities afforded him from his years with Enders, Miller became known at Yale as a mentor who, like Enders, regularly shared his time and insights to inspire the next generation of scientists.

Among them is Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. Hotez became a familiar face during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, regularly tapped by TV news to explain the science to an uneasy public.

"George taught me how to think through a problem," Hotez said. "Whether it's seeing a patient with an unknown infectious illness or how to manage things during an epidemic."

Hotez said he and Miller have privately discussed the rising misinformation against vaccines and "how horrified we are that we have to even defend vaccines."

Hotez, author of the 2018 book "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism," has drawn on his experiences as a pediatrician, vaccine scientist, and father of an autistic child to push back against the growing, false claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes the developmental disorder.

"I grew up in this era when vaccine scientists were considered something heroic," said Hotez, who is 66. "And that's what I wanted to do with my life."

For his 70th birthday in 2007, some of Miller's former students organized a symposium to honor their mentor. Nearly 200 flocked to Yale, coming from around the world where many now hold prestigious positions in science, said Dr. Sumita Bhaduri-McIntosh, director of Pediatric Infectious Disease Research at the University of Florida, who helped organize the event.

"Many of us are continuing the tradition of paying this one forward by training the next generation that follows us," she said.

In Hotez, that tradition will come full circle next month.

Boston Children's Hospital each year invites a science luminary to lead a special teaching session for doctors and medical students in honor of Enders.

And on April 16, Hotez will lead that session.

"George taught me not only how to be a good scientist, but how to conduct myself, to show integrity and to explain science," Hotez said.

"I was totally thrilled to get that invitation," Hotez added, "because Enders is one of my biomedical heroes."

Jeremiah Manion of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Kay Lazar can be reached at kay.Lazar@globe.Com Follow her @GlobeKayLazar.

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