Читать книгу The Polio Hole - Shelley JD Mickle - Страница 6

Jonas Salk was born the same year as my father. He was the oldest of three brothers and the son of Jewish parents who immigrated to New York City from Russia, who convinced him that education was the ticket to a good life in America, and so he better get on with the books.

When he is only twelve, he enters a public high school for gifted students. He goes to the City College of New York a month right before he turns sixteen and signs up for pre-law, but nearly flunks: a D in French, a C in English, a B in history. He switches to pre-med. And here is where he feels a spark. Here, he feels his seemingly insatiable curiosity being fed. One answer leads to another question. And another question leads to a theory that can then be tested by an experiment; and if that fails, another question arises, and if that answer works, then on and on into boundless arenas, throwing light on one disease and sometimes another, each playing a part in a lifesaving cure. Maybe. And that maybe is critical because maybe means possible, and possible is everything.

When he is ready for medical school, Salk finds a dumb, disturbing rule: Most schools will accept no more than five Jews, two Catholics, and no blacks. New York University does not discriminate against Jews, and Salk applies and is accepted. He studies virology. When he graduates, he works tirelessly in the field of flu research, which fascinates him with its seemingly endless strains. The need is urgent, too. The recent 1918 worldwide flu epidemic has killed millions.

Albert Sabin, eight years older than Jonas Salk, comes with his parents from Poland, to escape the murderous pogroms that killed Jews after World War I. They settle in New Jersey. Sabin is a sophomore in high school but speaks no English. Sabin gets across the idea to his school principal that he wants to be in the tenth grade. The principal agrees, but warns that if Sabin flunks the tenth grade, he will have to start all over, maybe even down in elementary school. Sabin passes and, while learning English, reads two books that work magic on who he wishes to become. Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis bring to life the intellectual adventures of basic medical scientists, and if the stories romanticize curing diseases a bit and diminish the frustration and grueling work involved, Sabin does not notice, or care. His problem is his uncle. The uncle, a dentist, has his own ideas of who Sabin should be, and offers to pay Sabin’s tuition and all expenses through dental school. The catch is that Sabin will go, then return to take over the uncle’s practice.

The deal appeals to Sabin. He enters dental school, but rather quickly finds the subject nearly bores him out of his everlovin’ mind. Yet, he can’t shake his fascination with science and the possibility of solving problems rooted in biology and disease. He quits dental school; his uncle cuts him off; the dean of the New York University Medical School comes to Sabin’s rescue, giving him a scholarship, paying for his food and rent and finding him a job at Harlem Hospital working with pneumonia patients. There, Sabin develops a way of typing pneumococci, the germ that causes pneumonia, thereby providing a quick means to destroy it, and he is on his way to becoming a renowned virologist. Viruses, he finds, are endlessly fascinating. Stubbornness, his dominant trait, is his magic. Once he catches hold of a problem, he shakes it silly.

Now with both Drs. Salk and Sabin taking on the search for a vaccine to prevent the poliovirus infection, mistakes are worth a second look. And a stunning assumption has misled research for decades. Simply, researchers have been running experiments on the wrong monkey. The rhesus monkey, the first chosen, has been found to be the only monkey not to “catch” the virus through the mouth.

Because polio was a human disease and animals did not “catch” it, researchers had to “give” the illness to some living being in order to study it. Running experiments on humans was not a possibility. Children could not be put at such risk. So the mistake took root when a researcher fed the polio virus to a rhesus monkey that did not get sick. Yet, when the researcher shot the virus into the monkey’s brain and spinal cord, the virus thrived there. Eventually, this type of rhesus monkey would be found to be the only one not to contract the virus through the mouth. Injecting the virus into the brain for the test subject to “catch” it confused the portal of entry issue for years. Simply, animal models do not always handle a disease in the same way that humans do.

So for a long while, the assumption was that, in humans, the virus must be contracted through the nose. Even Sabin embraced this theory, leading to the obvious simple conclusion to block the portal for the virus. Stuff the nasal passages with chemicals. Spray the air. Cover the nose and stop the epidemic.

In l941, Sabin took the lead in answering the portal of entry question by traveling to various hospitals all over the country, collecting material from those who had died from the illness. He found that, while plenty of the poliovirus was in the alimentary tract on its way to the stomach, rarely was any in the nasal passages. The crucial experiment came at Johns Hopkins Hospital when researchers cut the olfactory nerves in the nose of a chimpanzee, then fed it large doses of poliovirus by mouth. The animal quickly caught the disease. The portal of entry had definitely been found. But the mistake had stolen precious time.

Dr. Salk now decides the next pressing question to address is how many strains of the poliovirus exist. If there are numerous flu strains, can’t there be three, five, fifteen types of poliovirus?

Clearly, a new monkey test subject is needed, one that will be plentiful, small, easy to work with and also will handle the virus much the way a human does: in through the mouth, then replicating in the gastrointestinal tract. The Indian rhesus monkey becomes the final choice, and hours and hours of meetings are held discussing the best way to procure them and keep them.

By the time Dr. Horstmann figures out that the virus does indeed have a viremic phase, Dr. Salk is taking on the gruelling task of studying hundreds of samples from polio patients by passing them through monkeys in hopes of answering how many types of the virus there are.

Funny—Zip, my stuffed toy monkey, comes into my mind. Lying in the Isolation Hospital, six years old and sicker than a dog, I begin yearning for Zip—my Zip, a black furry toy with rubber hands.