Robert W. McCollum | Medical school dean, 85

Robert W. McCollum, 85, a former dean of the Dartmouth Medical School who made significant contributions to the understanding of viral diseases, including polio, hepatitis, and mononucleosis, died of heart failure Sept. 13 at his home in Etna, N.H.

Most of Dr. McCollum's research was done during his nearly three decades as a professor and later chairman of the epidemiology department at Yale University.

Working on a team at Yale led by Dorothy M. Horstmann in the early 1950s, Dr. McCollum and his colleagues collected blood samples from people with polio and their families. They used some of the samples to isolate the polio virus and discovered that before it reached the spinal cord and paralyzed patients, it circulated in the blood.

That finding was a breakthrough in the understanding of how the virus causes the disease and formed a basis for the development of polio vaccines, which elicit antibodies to block the virus before it enters the spinal cord.

Dr. McCollum was also a member of a research team that discovered that using blood from paid donors was risky because it tended to transmit hepatitis. The recommendation that blood banks stop using blood from paid donors has been widely adopted. Mr. McCollum was also on a team at Yale that discovered the viral cause of infectious mononucleosis.

Dr. McCollum left Yale in 1982 to become dean of the Dartmouth Medical School. In his nearly nine years as dean, he oversaw substantial increases in research financing and established eight new endowed chairs for the school's faculty.

- N.Y. Times News Service