Robert Chanok, children's disease pioneer, dies

Robert Chanock, an internationally renowned virologist who identified a baffling pathogen that infects the majority of infants and is the most common cause of life-threatening pneumonia in premature babies, died Friday in Sykesville, Md. He had Alzheimer's disease. He was 86.

In 1968, Chanock became chief of NIAID's Laboratory of Infectious Diseases. The central mystery of his career was a ubiquitous virus that rips through hospitals and the larger community each winter. The world's most common cause of serious lower respiratory infection in infants, it affects almost every child before the age of 2 and causes the death of at least 200,000 babies each year.

In the 1950s, Chanock became the first to identify and characterize this pathogen, which he called human respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. He and his team succeeded in developing an RSV vaccine, but while conducting clinical trials they were horrified to discover that rather than immunizing patients against the virus, the vaccine appeared to intensify symptoms.

Chanock continued working on the problem, eventually developing another vaccine that is currently in clinical trials.