From 1949 to 1952 he was a virologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland,[1] where he worked in Erich Traub's laboratory.
[8] From 1952 until his death in 1983 Rowe was a federal civil servant employed by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
[9][10][11][12][13] He was among the first "to recognize the role of the immune response in the pathogenesis of murine lymphocytic choriomeningitis.
[17][1] The discoveries of adenoviruses by Rowe et al. (1953) and by Hilleman and Werner (1954) aroused great interest and excitement among clinicians and virologists alike in that no new acute viral respiratory disease of humans had been isolated since the identification of influenza virus 20 years earlier (Smith et al., 1933).
After divorcing his first wife, Wallace Rowe married the virologist Paula Pitha (1937–2015).