Robert Merritt Chanock (July 8, 1924 – July 30, 2010) was an American pediatrician and virologist who made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of childhood respiratory infections in more than 50 years spent at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Chanock was born July 8, 1924 in Chicago. His post-secondary plans were to study physics. When he was drafted by the United States Army in 1943, he was given the choice of attending medical school with his course of study paid for by the military or going to the front lines. Chanock passed the entrance examination and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1945 and the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1947. He did his internship at Highland Hospital in Oakland and trained in pediatrics at the University of Chicago. After completing his medical training, he did a fellowship at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital, where he worked under Albert Sabin, who called Chanock his "star scientific son." He was drafted by the Army in 1952 and was sent to Korea to help deal with an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis, but a ruptured appendix forced him to Tokyo, where he did research on infectious disease. He returned to Children's Hospital after being released from Army duty, and later did research at the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University. He joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he discovered the human respiratory syncytial virus, which is the cause of respiratory tract infections in children each winter, and is one of the most common causes of illness. Asked the best means to prevent the disease, Chanock quipped "one thing you can tell them is to have their babies in the spring". In 1962 Robert Chanock visited Dr. Leonard Hayflick at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to obtain a culture of his normal human fetal cell strain, WI-38, because of Hayflick’s report that it replicated all of the then known human viruses. Chanock described his work with the “Eaton Agent” to Hayflick where it was assumed it to be the viral cause of Primary Atypical Pneumonia (PAP) or “walking pneumonia” in humans. This cause was never proven. Hayflick suggested to Chanock that the cause might be a mycoplasma (then called a PPLO). Hayflick wrote his thesis on mycoplasma causes of respiratory diseases in animals and suggested to Chanock that PAP might be caused