Word: polio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rosalind Ragans can still remember the contagion ward in a New York City hospital where she spent three months as a victim of the 1944 polio epidemic. Of the nearly 600,000 Americans who were infected by the poliomyelitis virus in this century before the development of vaccines for the disease in the 1950s, about 10% died, while many of the survivors, like Ragans, suffered some degree of paralysis. Stricken at age eleven, she was at first confined to a wheelchair, but gradually recovered enough to lead a normal life. Her slight difficulty in walking and partly paralyzed right...
Then, about ten years ago, she noticed that the pain and weakness she had endured as a polio victim were returning. Says she: "My right arm was hanging by my side. I began to get frightened." Seeking help, Ragans visited the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Georgia, named for perhaps the most famous polio victim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There doctors finally diagnosed her problem: post-poliomyelitis muscular atrophy, an affliction that strikes many former polio patients with symptoms that in some ways mimic the original disease. Across the U.S., PPMA is affecting more and more...
...serious men have attempted an answer. One is Jonas Salk. "When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine," he said of his early clinical tests, "you don't sleep well for two or three months." So Salk tested the vaccine on himself, his wife and his own children. This is an extraordinary response. It certainly could not have improved his sleep. It did not even solve the ethical dilemma. After all, the Salk children were put at risk, and they were no less innocent than the rest. But by involving his own kin (and himself), Salk arranged to suffer...
...imperative to respect the individual, he counsels: if you must do it, do it, but do not deny the moral force of the imperative you violate. In a society that grants the future some claims, a society that will not countenance the endless destruction of children by polio - or by hypoplastic left-heart syndrome - " research medicine, like politics, [becomes] a realm in which men have to 'sin bravely.' " Baby Fae lived, and died, in that realm. Only the bravery was missing: no one would admit the violation. Bravery was instead fatuously ascribed to Baby Fae, a creature...
...exactly the right direction," says Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Lewis C. Cantley, adding, "Critics say no treatment may ever come out of it, but a good analysis is polio. Much money was spent on the design of a better iron lung machine, but not on the idea of using a serum. With cancer, much less has been spent on clinical treatment, but we may get the breakthrough from a different line of a research...