In , an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available, greatly facilitating distribution of the polio vaccine. Today, there are just a handful of polio cases in the United States every year.
He died in La Jolla, California , in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased—21 women and 18 men of varying ages—were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike In a ceremony at the White House, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign a historic peace agreement, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties.
Less than two years Italy attacks the British fleet at Souda Bay, Crete, using detachable warheads to sink a British cruiser. The manned torpedo, also known as the The antiwar movement had initially given Nixon a chance to make good on his campaign promises to end the war in On March 26, , President Thomas Jefferson attends a public party at the Senate and leads a diverse crowd in consuming an enormous loaf of bread dubbed the mammoth loaf. The giant bread was baked to go with the remnants of an enormous block of cheese.
Two years earlier, a Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. This Side of Paradise is published, immediately launching year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald to fame and fortune.
Watson Home for Crippled Children outside of Pittsburgh. Salk had picked this particular place for his first trial because it was sufficiently isolated from colleagues and reporters; he wanted to keep the trial from the eyes of the public until it was over. The children would of course not derive any medical benefit from these trials. Salk was testing for side effects first and foremost, as well as for antibody production, and so polio victims seemed like the ideal first subjects, since there was presumably no risk of their accidentally contracting the disease.
As Oshinsky explains, Salk first determined which type of polio the children had suffered from by checking which antibodies were present in their blood, and then injected them with a killed-virus vaccine derived only from that type, to ensure that they would not be put at risk of infection by a different type of polio. None of the subjects showed adverse effects, and all showed elevated antibody levels.
But these subjects already had antibodies against the particular type of polio they had contracted. So Salk had to test again, this time in a riskier trial with children who had not had polio — and thus had no acquired immunity — but had already been crippled by other causes.
This way the safety of the vaccine could be tested again on children — the population who was most susceptible to contracting the disease and who would need to receive vaccination — while not risking the paralytic effects of polio, should any of the children accidentally get the disease from the vaccine. Of course, if they did, their existing paralysis would do nothing to prevent the other possible effects of polio, including fever and acute illness, winding up on an iron lung, or death.
In the event, none of the twenty-seven came down with polio from the vaccine. And the vaccine worked. Then he inoculated cultures of monkey kidney cells with the mixtures. Instead of dying from infection, the kidney cells thrived. Compared to the feeling I got seeing these results under the microscope, everything that followed was anticlimactic.
This trial also succeeded. Whether the polio trials were ethical remains a live question. A fine line separated heroic boldness from moral deformity. First, there was the problem of consent. In the case of the mentally disabled children housed at the Polk school, many had no family members to speak for them.
However careful that process, we might expect that distant state bureaucrats would not advocate for the children as aggressively as family members would have. Moreover, although there is no tangible indication that any of the overseers saw the children as disposable, the trials took place in an era when vulnerable people were often the first choice for medical experimentation. Given that Salk had earlier infected adult mental patients with the flu, we might wonder whether the prevailing attitude toward institutionalized people affected the polio trials.
Then there were the risks of administering an untried vaccine. On the one hand, Salk took extensive precautions, doing all that he could to minimize potential harm — which was more than could be said of many of his contemporaries and indeed of his own earlier experiments. On the other hand, these precautions might not have been enough. Any number of things might still have gone wrong. All medicine, experimental or otherwise, involves some risk of harm.
The essential question is whether test subjects also stand to benefit medically from an experiment. This was clearly the case for the children who had not yet had polio, who would potentially gain protection from the disease. Somewhat paradoxically, the children who had already had polio constitute the more morally ambiguous case. Salk was specifically testing them for the risk of side effects, while they would not be able to receive any benefit from the trials — meaning that they were treated as experimental subjects rather than as patients.
As Jonas Salk has often remarked, it would be impossible to repeat his polio work today, when such ventures need to be passed by human-subject review boards and peer review boards and various other qualifying agencies.
In you got the permission of the people involved and went out and did it, and then wrote up your results in a scientific journal. If something terrible happened, the blame would be on your head and the blood on your hands, and of course your career would be over — but in the planning stages, at least, life was a great deal easier for the medical experimenter than it has since become.
Medical trials, particularly with children and mentally disabled individuals, require the most careful ethical considerations, including assessments of the risks and potential benefits to the subjects.
What is indeed impossible today is to make these assessments single-handedly. It is also worth noting that Salk did what he could to get the vaccine right before the trials because the patients in these studies mattered to him.
It was an era of harrowing epidemics, and Salk had to think of the fate of unknown thousands as well as to feel for the dozens of children in his immediate care. Not everyone involved in the eventual production of the Salk vaccine would be so scrupulous as he, and the consequences were tragic. Carelessness amounting to recklessness on the part of pharmaceutical manufacturers, as we shall see, marred and threatened to undo his triumph.
When he presented the results to the Committee on Immunization in January , his colleagues were skeptical. He flayed him for choosing the wrong viral strains and abused him for using the possibly carcinogenic adjuvant mineral oil. Other committee members worried about allergic reactions, organ damage, and other potential dangers. Salk had reason to worry he would be condemned to further lab work, world without end.
Yet some members then began to push for a definitive field trial. The predictable media storm ensued. Scientists and doctors fumed. The glory hound was seeking public approbation rather than judicious professional critique. Physicians were placed in the awkward position of trying to satisfy the public outcry for vaccine magic when the doctors themselves were no better informed than their patients. The popular worship was underway, but among the scientific ranks numbered many unbelievers.
Richard Carter reports that detractors protested the intolerable halo and started mocking Salk as Jonas E. The rabies vaccine was rarely called the Pasteur vaccine.
The yellow-fever vaccine was never called the Theiler vaccine. Nobody outside the scientific community could name the men who had developed whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza, tetanus, typhoid, or encephalitis vaccines. Salk was soon to have his doubts about the NFIP. In June the Foundation announced a field trial for the fall, and Salk found out about it in the newspaper. The insult must have seared him. Weaver was not so magnanimous. Maneuvering his way around the refractory Committee on Immunization, he organized the Vaccine Advisory Committee, essentially to do his bidding; he excluded Salk and the other dawdlers and loaded the new committee with men in a hurry.
But the speed demon Weaver soon found himself at odds with his superior the more cautious medical director, Hart Van Riper , and Weaver soon resigned. Salk would now be at odds with Joseph Bell, the new scientific director of the trial. Bell advocated a double-blind study, using a flu vaccine as placebo so that those not receiving the polio vaccine would still get something of medical value. Salk wanted observed controls, in which second-grade students would receive the vaccine voluntarily while their first- and third-grade schoolmates who did not receive any injection would serve as the control cohort.
Bell would resign when the Vaccine Advisory Committee rejected his proposal for using a flu vaccine as placebo, while Salk continued to advocate for a trial with observed controls. In the end Thomas Francis, the man who had originally recruited Salk to the NFIP, oversaw the field trial, and there would be both a double-blind trial with placebo and a smaller observed-control trial.
Furthermore, the mineral oil adjuvant, presumed dangerous though it was not, was eliminated in favor of a water-based solution. As the planned trial date neared, opponents sought further delay and tried to muscle the Salk vaccine out of business. Albert Sabin wanted to put off the trial effectively for years. There was no proof that the Salk vaccine conferred long-lasting immunity, Sabin contended, and the type 1 strain Salk had worked from was so virulent that if any live virus remained in the vaccine, children could be doomed.
Only the weakened live virus oral vaccine Sabin himself was working on would really do everything a vaccine was supposed to do.
Sabin would never waver in that conviction. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine — it may be a killer! Vestiges of live virus had contaminated the Salk vaccine, he averred, monkeys inoculated with it had died of polio, and hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren were in imminent danger of paralysis or death.
Winchell had cunningly smudged the truth until it was unrecognizable. Jonas E. The Parke, Davis lot had been treated with Formalin too briefly to inactivate all the virus, an error that Parke, Davis did not plan to repeat. There was no danger to the human population. Salk attested that he had just vaccinated his own children. The largest clinical trial ever would proceed as planned on April 26, , with nearly 1.
Jacobs hails the superb logistics of the trial, which showed the NFIP in full glory, mobilizing tens of thousands of physicians, nurses, elementary school principals and teachers, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. He insisted the trial be conducted by those who had demonstrated loyalty to the March of Dimes. Just shy of a year later, on April 12, , Thomas Francis announced the results of the trial at the University of Michigan.
The findings were striking: In both the double-blind and the observed-control studies, the vaccinated groups had developed paralytic polio at about one-third the rate of the control groups.
On average across the different types, Francis reported, the vaccine was eighty to ninety percent effective. The moment belonged to Jonas Salk. The audience of over a thousand gave him a standing ovation as he took the stage. He duly thanked the many people who had made this success possible — though he would justly be faulted for his failure to mention each of his laboratory associates by name.
An infuriated Francis would in private dress Salk down for that final prediction. But that day would in fact come. There were over a hundred reporters at the event. Word got out everywhere and fast. Jubilation was general: the scourge had been whipped. Every front page headline and every newscast proclaimed the victory. Church bells and fire sirens made a joyful noise. Many observed a moment of silence in schools and workplaces.
Others gathered in places of worship to pray in thanks. People wept openly. That evening Salk appeared on Edward R. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun? It all seemed unreal, the sort of thing that would surely end and be forgotten as suddenly as it had begun. But Ed Murrow knew better. Everyone wanted a piece of him, as Carter and Jacobs relate in detail. The governor of California tried to enlist Salk as a mental health consultant. The mayor of New York intended to throw a ticker tape parade and bury him in confetti.
A hospital planned to rename itself the Jonas E. Biopic offers from Hollywood poured in; Marlon Brando was pitched as the lead. But Salk turned down all such come-ons. Fame of this order was not for him. Of course, some honors he could not refuse. President Eisenhower decorated him with a medal. Oslo, Norway commissioned his portrait. The serious work of mass immunization was proceeding, but that was now out of the hands of Salk and the NFIP and in less caring and capable ones.
The first problem was that Oveta Culp Hobby, U. Things would get bleaker still, and Salk would be in the spotlight again, most uncomfortably. In late April , two weeks after the national celebration, reports started coming in of paralysis in children who had just been vaccinated. As the cases multiplied, including parents, siblings, and friends of vaccinated children, it became evident that live virus had contaminated certain lots of vaccine from Cutter Laboratories.
Everyone involved denied responsibility and searched for someone else to blame. The government claimed it was only responsible for licensing the vaccine, and the manufacturers pointed out that they had followed the approved protocols, though Salk insisted that there must have been some error on their part.
Surgeon General Leonard Scheele convened Salk and others to help find out what had gone wrong. As Jacobs explains, Salk had used — and directed all manufacturers to use — a compressed asbestos system to filter the virus solution before and after inactivation with formalin. This was the exception that proved the rule that proved how right we were in the way in which we had proceeded.
That was something from which it was necessary to recover. Our vaccine was suspended. Its use was suspended for a short period of time, reintroduced again after that problem was isolated and that vaccine was withdrawn. All the others were used and things then proceeded in the normal fashion. You obviously had tremendous confidence in this vaccine. Was it nerve-wracking when you first tested this on humans? Jonas Salk: Yes. What I had confidence in were the results that we had obtained as we went along.
We had to understand how to destroy virus infectivity, so that we could do it reliably. Nevertheless, the first time that humans were inoculated it was a matter of some concern. Unknown events might have taken place, things that might have been overlooked. There was some apprehension until that phase of the experiment was over.
Before the field trial, I did a test in about 5, school children in the city of Pittsburgh which was of the nature to make sure that things did go well, before we went ahead and put this out on a much larger scale. And so, while it is true that we proceed on the basis of things that we know, about which we can have confidence, so to speak, that when you engage in human experimentation, you must proceed in a somewhat cautious manner and be prepared for the unforeseen and the unknowable.
Obviously, it was being carried out in an institution, lots of people knew about it. But we were not about to announce in the press because that was not the style in that day. The press was much less sophisticated in this regard. I saw no reason to try to carry out laboratory experimentation under a spotlight, any more than I would want to have the press in my laboratory, recording everything that is going on. There was a good deal of human interest involved, but that was not the primary objective.
It would have been distracting, as it is now. I still preserve that attitude. We began studies in humans in July of , and what we were doing was not known, generally speaking, until the end of January. There was a leak by Earl Wilson, the columnist for one of the New York newspapers, who heard of a meeting in which I spoke — the advisory committee of the March of Dimes, to reveal to them what we had learned.
Earl Wilson called Howard Howe, of Johns Hopkins University, thinking that it was his work that was referred to, because he had been carrying out studies in monkeys and chimpanzees.
Howard Howe said no, it was not he, it was Jonas Salk. That leak revealed that we had already inoculated human subjects, and the work had not yet been prepared for publication. So I quickly got underway, and within two months we had the results of the work published. Then everyone knew what was going on. Can you describe the day that the results of the national trial were announced?
That was a pretty big deal. Jonas Salk: It was on April 12, , that the announcement was made by Dr. Francis, who had conducted the field trial. He was my mentor back at New York University and at Pittsburgh in the work on influenza.
He had agreed to conduct these field trials for the March of Dimes. That was a very public event, and it was done with great fanfare. Many people were invited, scientists and non-scientists. It was held in Ann Arbor, staged by the University of Michigan, using this occasion to draw attention to what had been done. It was then that I became looked upon as a public figure, and I had to fight and struggle to continue on with my work. It was a big event, and it was a time when the news was good.
I was not on the outside, I was on the inside. I learned what it was like on the outside later. When people meet me even now, they remember exactly the moment when this announcement was made, and the events that followed. Jonas Salk: I suppose so. There was a great rejoicing, obviously.
Jonas Salk: As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. Jonas Salk: I think I was curious from the earliest age on. I have the suspicion that this curiosity was very much a part of my early life: asking questions about unreasonableness.
I tended to observe, and reflect and wonder. That sense of wonder, I think, is built into us. I kept it pretty much to myself, and when I reached that age at which I could do something about it, then I did. So it was not suppressed or destroyed. Obviously, you were doing a lot of thinking at an early age. Did you get along with your classmates?
Were you sociable? Jonas Salk: I got along with my classmates, but I was not as sociable a child. I could spend time by myself and I still do.
I would say that I spent more time alone than I did in social settings. Nevertheless, I did learn in time that I could spend time alone, as I do, walking on the beach. I spend time with others, of course, but also enjoy time with myself.
This change took place between leaving high school and entering college. I entered college enrolled as a pre-law student, but I changed to pre-med after I went through some soul searching as to what I would do other than the study of the law.
I was interested in science, and I began to think about the scientific aspect of medicine. My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist.
I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did.
And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis. Just as I intended to study law, to make just laws, so I found myself interested now in the laws of nature, as distinct from the laws the people make.
How did your parents react to your decision to go into medicine and science? Were they encouraging? Jonas Salk: Well, my parents were more than supportive, my mother particularly. My mother had no schooling. She came to this country from Russia in She immediately, as a young girl, began to work, you know, to help support the family.
And she was very ambitious in a sense for her children. She wanted her children to have more than she had, so that she lived her life and invested her life, lived through her children. I was the eldest of three sons and the favorite and the one who had all of her attention, certainly until my little brother was born — I was about five years old then — and my youngest brother when I was about I was essentially an only child in the sense of having her interest and concerns and attention.
She wanted to be sure that we all were going to advance in the world. Therefore we were encouraged in our studies, and overly protected in many ways. He was a more artistic person. He was a designer in the garment industry, so to speak.
He had not quite graduated from high school, only from elementary school. We were not brought up in a family which was already cultured. So, there was something special in the household that was very nurturing for — shall we say — advancing in the world, getting ahead. But whether it was in business or in law or in medicine, so to speak, was not of great concern.
You can accomplish great things even if you are the first in your family to go to college. Where do you think your sense of wanting to do something for humankind came from? Jonas Salk: I believe that this is part of our nature, and part of an ancestral heritage. Some people are constructive, if you like. Others are destructive. It sounds like you felt a personal sense of duty to do something for the world. Was that something your parents instilled in you?
Jonas Salk: I have the impression that people like that are born as well as made. You are born with that instinct. I think there is something inherited. We talk about the innate versus the acquired, about nature versus nurture. Our nature is revealed in the course of our life experience, and the nurturing comes from the opportunities that are available.
If I were born in some other country, for example, my life would have been quite different. Jonas Salk: As a matter of fact, I was not a great reader. I spent a good deal of time thinking, as I still do, about what went on in my life, my own observations and reflections.
I did read what was part of schooling, but I was not an avid reader. Jonas Salk: At the end of my first year of medical school, the professor of chemistry, Dr. Keith Cannon, tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to come to see him.
I was quite sure that he was going to tell me that I was failing and give me some bad news. Instead of which, he offered me an opportunity to drop out for a year and work with him in chemistry, during which time I could have my first experience in research, and also as a student teacher, so to speak.
Since my desire, from the time I entered medical school, was to enter into and to do scientific research, that was the break that I seized upon. It was a difficult decision to make, because I would have to leave my class, be alone, and in a sense be exceptional for that year, and then return to anther class. Nevertheless, I had the courage to do so. That was an important year. It was not an accomplished year, but it was the year that initiated a process. That was what was important. It was not the product of that year, but the initiation of a process, setting out on a path.
Jonas Salk: Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do. That was the beginning of many similar opportunities which have come my way. Why did you choose to pursue your career in the unconventional way you did?
Jonas Salk: It was not unconventional at that time. At that time, medical scientists were self-made. Jenner, who developed the vaccine against small pox, was not specifically trained. Pasteur was a biochemist. In spite of the fact that I did not have any formal training, I still was able to contribute in these ways, which allowed me to pick and choose whatever it was that I needed to know to address that question, bringing to bear whatever tools or techniques or knowledge I might need to obtain the answer.
You had phenomenal success in your work, but I gather there were some setbacks along the way. It seems shocking today, but you were turned down by a couple of institutes that you applied to after medical school.
Jonas Salk: In fact, my entering the field that led to work in vaccines came about as a result of my being denied an opportunity to work at another institution. There are two great tragedies in life. One is to not get what you want; the other is to get what you want.
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