Robert Shope

Robert Ellis Shope (February 21, 1929 Shope attended Cornell University, where he gained a BA in zoology and an MD (1954). After an internship at Yale School of Medicine, Shope joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps and served for a total of three years at Camp Detrick in Frederick, Maryland and then at the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He subsequently joined the Rockefeller Foundation and – after a year studying with Max Theiler in New York – he was posted to Belém, Brazil, at the foundation's International Virus Program, where he spent six years, rising to direct the institute.

Returning to the US in 1965, Shope joined the recently established Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) at Yale School of Medicine with other virologists from the Rockefeller Foundation. Initially an associate professor, he rose to direct the unit for 24 years. Shope also headed the university's Division of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. Epidemiologist and emerging infectious disease specialist Stephen S. Morse considered Shope to exemplify the approach of "integrating the laboratory and the epidemiological and being able to think broadly about the evolutionary issues as well as the specifics." With Allan Steer, he was the first to describe Lyme disease, a tick-borne bacterial disease, in the US. He subsequently worked on viral hemorrhagic fevers, discovering Sabiá and Guanarito viruses, the causative agents of Brazilian and Venezuelan hemorrhagic fevers. When he and Tesh moved to University of Texas Medical Branch in 1995, they brought the arbovirus collection – consisting of more than 4,000 strains of arbovirus and more than 1,000 other viral strains, as well as reagents such as antibodies – with them. Shope stated at the press conference announcing the report's publication: "The medical community and society at large have tended to view acute infectious diseases as a problem of the past. But that assumption is wrong. We claimed victory too soon." He was awarded the society's Bailey K. Ashford Medal (1974), Richard M. Taylor Award (1987) and Walter Reed Medal (1993). In 2005, ASTMH established the Robert E. Shope International Fellowship in Infectious Diseases in his memory. The University of Texas Medical Branch named its biosafety level 4 laboratory, completed just before his death, The Robert E. Shope, M.D. Laboratory, and also set up a fellowship in his memory. A symposium was held in his honour on March 18–21, 2004.