John F. Enders (1897–1985), Albert B. Sabin (1906–1993), Jonas E. Salk (1914–1995), Thomas H. Weller (1915–2008), Frederick C. Robbins (1916– 2003), Hilary Koprowski (b. 1916)
During the 1940s and 1950s, polio was the greatest public health threat. Movie theaters and public swimming pools emptied when periodic outbreaks of polio occurred, and the “iron lungs” lining hospital wards became its symbol. With the widespread adoption of polio vaccines, these are now historic memories. For the past decade, polio has been eradicated in all but four countries. Worldwide cases of polio precipitously fell from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,652 in 2007.
The pivotal breakthrough in the development of an effective vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis (polio) came in 1948, when American virologists John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins at Children’s Hospital, Boston, grew the poliovirus in tissue cultures outside the body; they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954. Using funding support from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes), founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh developed and, in 1954, successfully field-tested an injectable, killed-virus vaccine that was clinically introduced the following year.
In 1958, Albert Sabin at the University of Cincinnati developed another polio vaccine—this one using a live, attenuated (weakened) virus. Sabin’s oral vaccine provided longer-lasting immunity against all strains of polio and required no booster shots, yet it had the potential to cause vaccine-associated paralytic polio.
“Victory has a thousand fathers,” and this was the case for claimants of the polio vaccine. Salk was internationally acclaimed for his discovery, which he made no attempt to patent, but he failed to acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Enders, Weller, and Robbins. Sabin initially attacked the safety and effectiveness of the Salk vaccine, and for years his vaccine was preferentially used in the United States. Virtually forgotten is the Polish-born virologist Hilary Koprowski who, while working at Lederle Laboratories in 1950, developed the first orally effective, attenuated vaccine.
For the past decade, only Salk’s vaccine has been used in the United States and United Kingdom, while Sabin’s is preferred in developing countries.
SEE ALSO Smallpox Vaccine (1796), Gardasil (2006).
In 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) contracted an illness that resulted in permanent paralysis below the waist. The condition was originally diagnosed as polio, but some believe that it was actually Guillain-Barré syndrome. Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes in 1938 to support polio research and education.