Rash's Surname Index
Notes for G. Willard WEBSTER
G. Willard Webster, 95, a bacteriologist who helped produce lifesaving vaccines, died Aug. 13 at Foulkeways, a Quaker retirement community in Gwynedd.
While studying physics at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Webster washed glassware in a laboratory at Sharpe & Dohme, now Merck & Co. He eventually became a medical researcher in the pharmaceutical company's laboratory and launched a career.
During World War II, he received a deferment from military service to work with scientists, including Jonas Salk, who were preparing and testing an influenza vaccine. The government was concerned that an epidemic would devastate U.S. troops overseas.
In 1945, Mr. Webster joined Wyeth Pharmaceuticals in West Chester, where he helped develop a laboratory to mass-produce penicillin. In the late 1940s, he consulted for a venture capitalist who built a penicillin plant in Belgium, his daughter Marie Wells said.
Mr. Webster joined National Drug Co. in Swiftwater in the Poconos in 1950. The company was acquired by Connaught Laboratories, now Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine division of Sanofi-Adventis.
As associate vice president of production and engineering at the Swiftwater plant, he helped design and construct laboratories for tissue-culture production, infectious-disease research, and yellow fever, influenza, and tetanus vaccine production. After retiring in 1978, he was a consultant at the plant until 1993. In 1987, the influenza building at Swiftwater was dedicated in his honor.
Mr. Webster graduated from Westtown Friends School, where his father was groundskeeper.
In the early 1930s, before earning a bachelor's degree from Penn, he worked in social programs for coal miners' children in Kentucky and Tennessee sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee.
An Eagle Scout, Mr. Webster was a Boy Scout leader for a troop in the Poconos, where he and his wife, Alice Stratton Webster, raised four children. He was active in the Rotary Club.
He enjoyed woodworking and home-improvement projects and caned chairs for neighbors at Foulkeways after he and his wife moved there in 1993. He was past president of the Foulkeways Residents Association, served as fire marshal, and was a member of the Barn Committee, assisting in the secondhand shop at Foulkeways.
Mr. Webster served on the board and was past treasurer and finance secretary of the Parenteral Drug Association, which provides technical information on pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturing.
In addition to his wife of 65 years and daughter, he is survived by sons Robert and William; another daughter, Virginia Sims; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
A memorial service was held Aug. 16 at Foulkeways.
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