PITTSBURGH’S POLIO PRE-PIONEERS
A tribute to the schoolchildren who showed the Salk vaccine was safe
Everyone older than 75 remembers polio, the ruthless summertime maimer of healthy children. The summer of 1952 was especially bad, with 58,000 U.S. cases of paralytic polio. Pediatric wards filled up with kids encased in “iron lungs.” The peak age of new cases was 6 years old — exactly my age that year.
No one knew where the virus lurked. When my neighborhood pal Billy caught polio, my mom and dad forbade us from going anywhere near the “polio pond” across the street from Billy’s house. For parents, polio was a living nightmare.
Then a savior appeared. Seventy years ago today, on the evening of Thursday, March 26, 1953, Dr. Jonas E. Salk went on CBS radio to tell the nation that he had developed a vaccine against the poliovirus. In a broadcast entitled “The Scientist Speaks for Himself,” the 39-year-old University of Pittsburgh professor announced that an article would be appearing soon in the Journal of the American Medical Association which featured “a preliminary report of studies that are in progress in human subjects on vaccination against poliomyelitis.”
Salk’s motivation for going public on national radio was to get ahead of what he and his backers at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) expected might become a media frenzy when the article was published. In his attempt to manage expectations, Salk declared that “there will be no vaccine available for widespread use in the next polio season” and that “this objective will be achieved if we move cautiously, and with understanding, step by step.”
He was absolutely right to foresee a media frenzy — but dead wrong about getting ahead of it. The Salk vaccine instantly became front page news, and Jonas Salk was suddenly transformed into a scientific celebrity.
In that CBS broadcast Salk explained that he and his University of Pittsburgh team had developed a polio vaccine against the three different types of poliovirus by growing the virus to high concentrations in test tube cultures of monkey cells and inactivating or “killing” the viruses by adding just the right amount of formaldehyde.
He reported that they had tested these killed virus preparations — pilot vaccines — in 161 human subjects at the D.T. Watson Home in Pittsburgh, and the Polk State School 80 miles north of the city. The results were promising: The vaccine was safe, and blood serum drawn from inoculated subjects contained high levels of antibodies that prevented polioviruses from growing in cell cultures — good evidence that vaccination should block the virus from growing in humans. The stage was set to move on to larger field trials to determine if Salk’s vaccine could not only stimulate the right kinds of antibodies, but actually prevent polio infections and paralysis.