Hilary Koprowski - Life

Life

Born to a family of Jewish background, Hilary Koprowski grew up in Warsaw where he attended the Mikołaj Rej High School and from age twelve took piano lessons at the Warsaw Conservatory. He received his medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine at Warsaw University in 1939. He also received music degrees from the Warsaw Conservatory and, in 1940, from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He adopted scientific research as his life's work, though he never gave up music and composed several musical works.

In 1939, after the Nazi invasion of Poland Koprowski and his wife Irena, a medical doctor, fled from Poland using Koprowski family business connections in Manchester England. Hilary went to Rome where he spent a year studying piano in the Santa Cecilia Conservatory. Meanwhile, Irena fled to France where she birthed her first child Claude Koprowski and worked as an attending physician at an insane asylum. As the invasion of France loomed near in 1940, Irena and the infant escaped France via Spain and Portugal (where the Koprowski family reunited), to Brazil, where Koprowski worked in Rio de Janeiro for the Rockefeller Foundation. His field of research for several years was finding a live-virus vaccine against yellow fever.

After World War II the Koprowskis settled in Pearl River, New York, where Koprowski was hired as a researcher for Lederle Laboratories, the pharmaceutical division of American Cyanamid. Here Koprowski began his polio experiments which ultimately led to the discovery of the first oral polio vaccine. On account of his employment in the pharmaceutical industry, some of his academic colleagues called him a "commercial scientist."

In July 1938, Koprowski had married Irena Koprowska. They have two sons, Claude (born 1940 in Paris) and Christopher (born 1951). Claude Koprowski is a retired physician. Christopher Koprowski is a physician certified in two specialties: neurology, and radio-oncology; he is chair of the department of radiation oncology at Christiana Hospital in Delaware.

Koprowski served as director of The Wistar Institute from 1957 to 1991, a period during which Wistar achieved international recognition for its vaccine research and became a National Cancer Institute Cancer Center.