Word: salk
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Often it was hard to pick one person to credit for a particular advance. Some cases involved famous rivalries, such as Farnsworth vs. Vladimir Zworykin over inventing television, or Jonas Salk vs. Albert Sabin over developing a polio vaccine. Other cases, such as the creation of the atom bomb or the computer, involved a series of contributions. Although there is a danger in personalizing history, there is also an advantage. By choosing the people we feel were most responsible for key breakthroughs, and then exploring their relations and rivalries, we hope to convey the human excitement that makes real...
Between occasional shouts of "Eureka!" even the heroes of science tend to have quiet careers. But Salk's career stands out in at least two respects: the sheer speed with which he outraced all the other tortoises in the field and the honors he did not receive for doing so. How could the Man Who Saved the Children be denied a Nobel Prize? Or summarily be turned down for membership in the National Academy of Sciences? What was it about Salk that so annoyed his fellow scientists...
Thus a monument to the conquest of polio faithful to the facts would consist of not one man in a white lab coat but two of them glaring at each other. Both Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin could and did make convincing cases for themselves and pretty good ones against each other too. But since the public usually prefers one hero to two, and since Salk did get there first, he got the monument...
...field agree that the adenovirus and retrovirus vectors are imperfect, to say the least. In addition to having immunological side effects, both lack the carrying capacity to accommodate the larger, more complex genes that would be useful in therapy. "There are only three problems in gene therapy," says Salk's Verma, "delivery, delivery and delivery. It isn't going to be a problem to make gene therapy work--if we have an appropriate set of tools to deliver the genes...
...other new vector is being fashioned by Salk's Verma. "What we want," he says, "is a virus that is easy to make, that delivers genes at very high efficiency, that can infect a nondividing cell and that enables its therapeutic gene to become part and parcel of the chromosome...