Word: salk
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From such diverse elements has formed the image of the age, at once soaring, shattered, bold, disintegrated and terrifying. The image has incorporated everything that freedom can stand for, all victories and insanities alike. How can the period that encouraged the development of the Salk vaccine have also allowed for the maraudings of the Baader-Meinhof gang? Because the spirit of these years has moved equally through killers and benefactors, each propelled by the same wind whispering the same neutral message: stability is not a natural state; nothing ought...
That was how the University of Michigan started off its terse summary of the verdict on the Salk polio vaccine. The reading of the report itself took longer, and the setting in the university's Rickham auditorium was elaborate. Under the klieg lights set up for TV and newsreel cameras, surrounded by microphones and 150 reporters, sat the unquestioned hero of the occasion: Dr. Jonas Edward Salk, 40, the determined, youthful-looking virologist who for five years had battled in his University of Pittsburgh laboratory to lick polio. Next to him sat the University of Michigan...
...Francis stopped when he finished telling what had been done. Dr. Salk, who rose to a standing ovation from 500 usually undemonstrative scientists, took a peek into the future: the vaccine, he suggested, might be made almost 100% effective. This does not mean that polio will be suddenly abolished. But it could mean that as vaccination becomes universal for children, whole generations will grow up free of the paralysis that has condemned so many to enfeebled limbs or iron lungs, eventually, polio can become as rare as smallpox-which U.S. doctors now rarey get a chance to identify...
...pharmaceutical firms* are now producing Salk vaccine or hurrying to get into production. The vaccine works on a principle that has already provided protection against such traditional plagues as smallpox and yellow fever. When they attack human beings or other mammals, most viruses stimulate the invaded system to manufacture tiny protein particles called antibodies. If the system under assault does not have enough of these antibodies or cannot manufacture them fast enough, the victim may die or, with polio, suffer permanent crippling...
Polio virus is unusual in that there are three main types. All can cause paralysis, but one type causes more than the others combined. Within each type there are many different strains. The Salk vaccine is made by taking a representative strain of each type and growing it-till it reaches many times its original strength-in a broth made with snips of monkey kidney. (To keep production going, 4,000 monkeys a month are flown in from India and the Philippines.) Then the virus in each deadly brew is killed with formaldehyde. Strangely, although the virus particles now lose...