Vaccine visionary Thomas Peebles dies

LOS ANGELES - Dr. Thomas C. Peebles, a World War II bomber pilot who isolated the measles virus, setting the stage for development of the vaccine that freed the world from the deadly scourge, died July 8 at his home in Port Charlotte, Fla. He was 89.

Peebles also led a team that showed the tetanus vaccine could be given every decade instead of every year, developed a way to add fluoride to children's vitamins to prevent tooth decay and founded one of the country's first health maintenance organizations.

The measles discovery came in only his third year after graduation from medical school while he was working in the Children's Hospital Boston laboratory of Dr. John F. Enders, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for isolating the polio virus.

"I am sure, as is often the case in scientific endeavor, that much of the successful recognition and isolation of this virus lay in perseverance, newness to the field, and failure to be bound by the preconceived ideas that caused others in the laboratory to miss this new effect," he wrote later.

Using the newly developed virus strain, called Edmonston B, the Enders team developed a measles vaccine that was licensed in 1963 and the measles rate began falling sharply. Peebles led a Harvard team that studied the tetanus vaccine. They found that the vaccine contained tens to hundreds of times the necessary dose of the tetanus antigen, creating a danger of allergic reactions that was greater than the risk of developing tetanus. They proved that a lower dose was safe and that it could be given much less frequently than was the current practice.

While he was working at the hospital, Peebles also ran a private practice out of his home. During routine examinations, he noticed that children living in communities where water was fluoridated had fewer cavities. Organizing a clinical trial among his own patients, he developed a fluoride additive for vitamins that reduced cavities among children in non-fluoridating communities.