Robert Shope, 74; Insect-Borne Virus Expert

Dr. Robert E. Shope, one of the world’s foremost authorities on insect-borne viruses, died Jan. 19 in Galveston, Texas, after a long illness. He was 74.

Shope established his reputation as a leading virologist during a 30-year career at Yale University, where he directed the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit and helped develop a unique reference collection of thousands of virus strains, many of them deadly.

A past president of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, he was often called a “walking encyclopedia” of viruses, who made major contributions to the understanding of infectious diseases and the promotion of global health.

In a move that made the front page of the New York Times, Shope left Yale in 1995 to follow his colleague, Dr. Robert Tesh, to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. They took with them their World Reference Center for Emerging Viruses and Arboviruses, which contains more than 4,000 strains of viruses spread by mosquitoes ticks and small, biting flies. Researchers from around the world use the collection of frozen samples to identify unknown viruses or characterize a particular viral strain.

Shope later became co-director of the University of Texas’ Center for Biodefense Studies, launched jointly with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study countermeasures against potential bioterrorist viruses, including those that cause yellow fever, Lassa fever and tick-borne encephalitis. His duties there included teaching FBI agents about infectious diseases.

Educated at Cornell University, the native of Princeton, N.J., went to Yale in 1954 as an intern at what is now Yale-New Haven Hospital. In 1958 he joined the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where his father, Richard Shope, isolated the flu virus and became the first researcher to show that a virus could cause cancer in animals.

In the 1960s the younger Shope led a World Health Organization viral research laboratory in Belem, Brazil, where he gained wide recognition for his demonstration of the unusual chain of transmission for a newly discovered virus that seemed to bypass people in its natural environment.

He returned to Yale in 1965 and six years later became director of its arbovirus lab, one of a handful in the country authorized to handle deadly viruses. One of its biggest finds during Shope’s tenure was the discovery that Rift Valley fever had moved outside its domain in sub-Saharan Africa to Egypt, where the mosquito-borne disease devastated the livestock population.

Shope is survived by his wife, Virginia, of Branford, Conn.; four children; two brothers; a sister; and six grandchildren.