The Death of a Disease: A History of the Eradication of Poliomyelitis

7. Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes 55 55 7 Behind the Scenes Toronto, Canada, 1954 March 29, 1954. The Canadian edition of Time is hot off the press, and Toronto’s renowned Connaught Laboratories are featured in this issue’s cover story. Canada has just endured its worst polio epidemic the previous year. Time’s cover asks the question on everyone’s lips: “Polio Fighter Salk: Is This the Year?” Across North America, families are fretting over whether their children will be able to go to the local swimming pool or to summer camp in a few months’ time. The public is longing for news of substance about a vaccine that has been the subject of hopes, promises, and controversy— not to mention extraordinary press coverage—over the preceding months and years. Will the vaccine work? How soon will the field trial begin? From Jonas Salk to the NFIP president Basil O’Connor to Mrs. Olveta Culp Hobby, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, no one knows. Not even the medical journalists at Time. There was still great uncertainty about the polio vaccine. 56 The Death of a Disease Jonas Salk is portrayed in his lab coat on the cover of Time. Next to him is the artist’s collage of virus particles, abandoned leg splints, crutches, and a row of vaccine-filled syringes. Little children are running, jumping, and roller skating around the letters T-I-M-E. On page 60, the Medicine section opens with a simple title: “Closing in on Polio ” where it explains that “Dr. Salk’s laboratories could not produce more than a fraction of the hundreds of gallons of vaccine needed” for a massive field trial. Then it describes Toronto’s Connaught Laboratories, today sanofi-aventis, which provided the critical bulk fluids for making the vaccine. Time explains how polio viral fluids, the basis of any vaccine, are made. The description, which leaves nothing to the imagination, provides a definition of tissue culture, explaining how tiny bits of monkey kidneys are suspended in nutrients to provide the ideal environment in which to grow the poliovirus. The University of Toronto’s Connaught Medical Research Laboratories use 60 to 65 monkeys in a single morning. Each is deeply anesthetized with ether. In a couple of minutes a skilled surgeon removes the kidneys . Then the monkey is killed with an overdose of ether. Patient technicians cut the kidneys into tiny pieces with nail scissors. The bits of tissue go into big glass bottles with a pink solution known by its formula designation: No. 199. Hundreds of bottles are rocked gently for six days in an incubator, and kidney cells grow in the fluid as though they were still in the living animal. In a room with the safety rules and precautions of a radioisotope laboratory, 2 cc. of fluid containing live poliovirus are added as a seed stock to each quart of Behind the Scenes 57 tissue fluid. Back to the rocker go the bottles. The virus multiplies a thousand-fold in the kidney cells, and after about four days the potentially deadly crop is ready for harvest. It is chilled in 21 /2 gal. bottles for trucking from Toronto to Eli Lilly & Co. and to Parke, Davis.1 The article mentions two Connaught discoveries that were crucial to the large-scale production and success of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine: Medium 199, the synthetic growth medium in which liters and liters of poliovirus could be grown safely, and the “Toronto Method” of rocking bottles, invented and perfected by Connaught’s Dr. Leone Norwood Farrell. Without these two innovations, the largest field trial in history, involving nearly two million children , would not have been possible. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later known as the March of Dimes) first took an interest in Toronto’s research capacities some fourteen years earlier when, in 1940, it gave Connaught Laboratories a $9,200 grant to fund polio field studies. It renewed these grants through 1943, when polio research had to take a back seat as the laboratories focused on supplying the typhus vaccine to the Canadian armed forces. Then, in the summer of 1947, Andrew J. Rhodes, a native of Scotland and an internationally recognized virologist and polio authority, arrived in Toronto. He had been recruited by Connaught’s Dr. Robert Defries. He was to head Connaught’s polio research efforts from 1947 to 1953 and, in 1948...