In 1954, Dr. John Enders and Dr. Thomas C. Peebles collected blood samples from ill students during a measles outbreak in Boston, hoping to isolate the virus and create a vaccine. The successfully isolated the virus from 13-year-old David Edmonston’s blood.

From 1961–1962 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted vaccine trials in West Africa. The study was conducted by Dr. Harry Meyer Jr., Chief of  the Section on General Virology in the Laboratory of Virology and Rickettsiology in the Division of Biologics Standards (DBS), Dr. Daniel Hostetler, Jr., and Barbara Bernheim, who spent 6 months in the Republic of Upper Volta in West Africa. They used the live attenuated Edmonston strain measles vaccine developed by Dr. John Enders at Harvard University. The NIH team and the eight 3-member Voltan teams that they trained together vaccinated more than 731,000 children between the ages of seven months and four years.