This Polish virologist saved millions of people from disability and death due to the raging epidemic. Thanks to his determination, the world received a salutary vaccine. However, the road to breakthrough discovery was not easy - nor ethical. Ready for anything, the researcher even went so far as to experiment on defenseless, disabled children ...
Hilary Koprowski was a man of many talents. He dreamed of a career as a pianist, but eventually became a virologist. Fortunately - this decision affected the fate of millions of children who, thanks to his vaccine, were saved from the fatal consequences of Heine-Medina disease.
However, this success would not have been possible if it had not been for the determination of the Polish researcher - and the readiness to turn a blind eye to "conventions", such as the ethics of conducting scientific experiments ... One of the students later said:
From the very beginning it was obvious that Koprowski was not the type of man who could be controlled in any way. If someone is going to hire such a personality, the only thing they can do is hand them over and leave them alone.
As a matter of fact, the head of the scientist at Lederle Laboratories, the pharmaceutical part of the American Cyanamid concern, the well-known virologist Herald Cox did. Meanwhile, left to himself, Koprowski devoted himself to feverish work. He was not bound by strict academic rules in a private corporation. The company's goal was simple - to create a safe and - above all - profitable vaccine as soon as possible.
A cocktail of spinal cord, brain and viruses
He started experimenting with mice. In 1947, by injecting rodents with a type II polio virus strain directly into the skulls, and then mixing the brains of infected animals with saline solution, he obtained a "broth" which he administered to cotton rats. After repeating the whole procedure several times, he was given a cocktail with suitably weakened germs.
He served this mixture to nine chimpanzees and then infected them with Heine-Medin disease. No animal developed symptoms. This was sufficient evidence for the Polish researcher to prove the effectiveness of his vaccine. As reported by David M. Oshinsky:
The next step for Koprowski was an important, though unwritten rule of scientific research:before testing his oral vaccine on others, he should try it on himself (...).
Koprowski's research was far from ethical, but it brought an amazing effect
Koprowski took his truth test in 1948. In the late winter afternoon, he and his assistant Thomas Norton prepared themselves a "polio cocktail" using a Wargin mixer. In it, they mixed pieces of the spinal cord and rat brain tissue into a "greasy slush".
After consuming this disgusting potion, none of the gentlemen got sick. Koprowski was able to beat off another success and move on to the next stage - human research.
"Playing with combat grenades"
The scientist "served" his specificity from live viruses to children in 1950. His living "guinea pigs" were little charges of the state shelter for "mentally impaired and epileptic" in Letchworth. David M. Oshinsky describes:
Koprowski was friends with the director of the facility, George Jervis. They both worked together once. According to Koprowski, Dr. Jervis pleaded with him to test his polio vaccine in Letchworth in the name of public safety. He had the impression that the children at the center were playing with their own droppings and throwing them around the building.
Koprowski's biographer, Roger Vaughan, compared the situation at the facility to "playing with combat grenades." Therefore, the Polish researcher agreed to administer the preparation to "non-immune volunteers" without hesitation.
The problem is that these "volunteers" (twenty children in total, each of whom had been given a tablespoon of the infectious substance dissolved in chocolate milk - two of them through a tube leading to the stomach because they were unable to swallow the mixture themselves!) experiment. Ba, it is not even clear whether Koprowski or Jervis got such consent from the parents of the vaccinated children. It is enough to say that when two years later the Pole published the results of the research, the journal "Lancet" commented:
The richness of the English language is, among other things, that the meaning of some words is constantly changing. For example, such a word "volunteer." We may later read in a scientific journal that the experiment was carried out with twenty volunteer mice, and twenty other mice, also volunteers, formed a control group.
I don't like ethics
Years later, Koprowski admitted: "If we were to do such a test now, we would go to jail and the company would be sued." Fortunately (also for the researcher himself), his method turned out to be effective - and safe. The vaccine developed by a Pole has become a powerful weapon in the fight against Heine-Medin disease.
Hilary Koprowski in 2007
In 1958, 250,000 small patients in Congo received the prophylactically tested preparation. Thanks to Koprowski, 9 million doses also went to Poland. Marcin Marczyński lists:
The effect after vaccination was immediate, thanks to the vaccine the number of patients dropped sharply. In 1959, there were more than a thousand children and infants infected with the virus, and in 1963, only thirty children. The incidence of Heine-Medina disease has dropped from several hundred per year to two.
Nevertheless, Koprowski was criticized by the communist authorities, which accused him of using Polish children as guinea pigs (and for this reason, until the end of the 1990s, the inventor of the polio vaccine was virtually unknown in our country). Well, in this case, the end did justify the means…
Bibliography:
- M. Marczyński, A. Pękacz, Hilary Koprowski - Polish physician, virologist and immunologist, "Humanum" 28 (1) / 2018, pp. 119–123.
- D. M. Oshinsky, Polio. The story of overcoming Heine-Medina disease, Prószyński i S-ka, Warsaw 2015.
- R. Vaughan, Tacts and Facts. The Life of Hilary Koprowski, Poznań Publishing House, Poznań 1999.