Word: sabin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last naturally caused case of polio in the U.S. was in 1979, recent announcements and recalls by government agencies have drawn public attention to the real if very small risks of inoculation. Each year an average of eight children are infected with polio by the otherwise highly effective Sabin oral vaccine, which is made from live but attenuated polio viruses. This danger was highlighted in June, when the Food and Drug Administration recommended the Salk killed-virus vaccine, which is safe but somewhat less effective, instead of the Sabin variety, for the first two of the four required polio inoculations...
...goal was truly in sight, and who got there first was largely a matter of speed--Salk's forte--and luck. "Salk was strictly a kitchen chemist," Sabin used to gripe. "He never had an original idea in his life." But imaginative people perennially underrate efficient ones, and at the time, the kitchen chemist--who prepared his vaccine by marinating the virus in formalin--was just what the doctor ordered...
...Salk and Sabin came from the two competing schools of vaccine research. Sabin, like Louis Pasteur, believed the way to produce immunity was to create a mild infection with a "live" but crippled virus, and he concocted his competing vaccine accordingly. Salk, from his flu-fighting days, knew the immune system could be triggered without infection, using deactivated, or "killed," viruses. And, as it turned out, his quick-and-dirty killed viruses were better suited to a crash program than Sabin's carefully attenuated live ones. By 1954, Salk and Francis were ready to launch the largest medical experiment...
...Salk came into his own as a spokesman for vaccination. Although it is generally accepted in the field that the real man on the monument should be Enders (who in 1954 shared the only Nobel Prize given for polio research), it seems unlikely that either he or the pugnacious Sabin would have performed half so patiently as Salk the ceremonial chores expected of monuments or would have sat so politely through so many interviews and spread the gospel of disease prevention quite so far and wide and indefatigably...
...last thing. Like the millions of American veterans who have never ceased thanking Harry Truman for dropping the Bomb and ending World War II, the folks who got their polio shot between the first Salk vaccine and the Sabin model have never had any quarrel with Salk's high place in history. (The two vaccines are now given in alternating booster shots.) There are times when even genius has to give way to the old Yankee virtues of know-how and can do. And if in this instance these happened to be embodied in the son of a couple...