Thomas H. Weller, the American virologist who shared a Nobel Prize for developing techniques to grow the polio virus in the laboratory, died Aug. 23 at his home in Needham, Mass. He was 93.

He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine with John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robins. The researchers demonstrated how to produce the polio virus in safe tissue cultures taken from a monkey, a discovery that led to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines against the disease.

The breakthrough by Weller and his colleagues was considered as “one of the major discoveries in virology, cell biology and molecular biology in the 20th Century,” as a Yale virologist described it.

Weller studied medical zoology at the University of Michigan. He received a B.S. and an M.S., with his master thesis on fish parasites. In 1936, Weller entered Harvard Medical School and three years later he began working under John Franklin Enders, with whom he would later (along with Frederick Chapman Robbins) share the Nobel Prize.

In 1963, Weller and three other researchers discovered the virus that causes German measles.

Weller headed the department of tropical public health at Harvard from 1954 to 1981. He also served, from 1953-1959, as Director of the Commission on Parasitic Diseases of the American Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.

The Harvard virologist has also contributed to treating schistosomiasis, and Coxsackie viruses. He was credited with being one of the first to isolate the viruses that cause chickenpox and shingles, as well as cytomegalovirus and rubella, or German measles.

In 1954, Weller married Kathleen Fahey. They had two sons and two daughters.

Thomas Huckle Weller was born June 15, 1915, in Ann Arbor, Mich., the son of a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School.