"Thirteen years after Sabin and Olitsky’s success with growing poliovirus in brain tissue, researchers at the lab of John Enders at the Children’s Hospital in Boston successfully grew the virus in a culture of skin and muscle tissue from a human embryo—in a fortunate happenstance. At the time, the researchers were focused on trying to isolate and grow varicella, the chickenpox virus. They had already succeeded in growing mumps and influenza viruses, and had moved on to varicella, which they knew grew in human cells. After preparing flasks with human embryonic tissue, they inoculated four flasks with throat washings from chickenpox patients. Another four flasks were inoculated with a strain of poliovirus as a control group. The chickenpox virus did not grow in this case, but to the researchers’ great surprise, poliovirus did. They went on to grow two other strains of poliovirus, and in many types of human embryonic tissue, without using nervous system tissue. They were able to grow the virus rapidly and to very high concentrations using the “roller tube” apparatus created by researcher George Otto Gey in the 1930s."