Word: salk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Behind Weaver's weeds stand years of painstaking work by Virus Researcher Jonas Salk in University of Pittsburgh laboratories. Dr. Salk and his co-workers take samples of all three varieties (the Lansing, Prunhilde and Leon strains) of polio virus and grow them in test tubes with pieces of monkey testicle. They grind up this stuff and treat it with formaldehyde. There is doubt as to whether the chemical "kills" the virus, but no doubt that it knocks it cold. Dr. Salk has taken some of the resulting vaccine and injected it into monkeys. Within three weeks, samples...
...Salk also found that if he put the formaldehyde-treated virus in a purified mineral oil, and injected it that way, the antibodies showed up in greater strength. (The oil probably cannot directly influence the making of antibodies, but it holds the virus material in the body longer, just as oils are used to hold penicillin in the system.) After a while, the monkeys got inoculations of live polio virus which ordinarily would have caused crippling disease or death; not one of them even got sick...