Robert W. McCollum

Robert Wayne McCollum, Jr. (January 29, 1925 – September 13, 2010) was an American virologist and epidemiologist who made pioneering studies into the nature and spread of polio, hepatitis and mononucleosis while at the Yale School of Medicine, after which he served for nearly a decade as Dean of the Dartmouth Medical School.

McCollum was born on January 29, 1925, in Waco, Texas, and earned his undergraduate degree there in 1945 from Baylor University. He received his medical training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, graduating in 1948. He did internships at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital in pathology and at Vanderbilt University Hospital in internal medicine and completed a residency in internal medicine at Yale – New Haven Hospital and began his career as a research assistant in preventive medicine at Yale University.

Working together with Dr. Dorothy M. Horstmann, McCollum isolated poliovirus in blood samples taken from those afflicted with the disease and from their family members, verifying that the virus was present in the bloodstream before it entered the spinal cord and caused paralysis. This discovery set the stage for the development of the polio vaccine.

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