Immediately following the scientific symposium, Julius S. Youngner shares a laugh with Pitt colleagues Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg (far left); Arthur S. Levine (far right), senior vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine; and Randy Juhl, vice chancellor for research conduct and compliance.

Undeterred by daunting technical challenges—and by die-hard antagonism to Jonas Salk’s proposed killed-virus polio vaccine among rival scientists who argued instead for a vaccine employing a weakened, live virus—the Pitt research team that created the first safe and effective polio vaccine worked “at what would now be considered breakneck speed,” recalled Julius S. Youngner, the sole surviving scientist from Salk’s core research team.

Speaking at the beginning of an April 11-12 Pitt symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of the announcement that the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent,” Youngner said he and his Pitt colleagues “were all too aware of the patients in iron lungs on the third floor above us in Municipal Hospital [now Salk Hall], and we knew the ever-increasing toll poliomyelitis was taking on children, teenagers, and adults”—58,000 new cases of polio in the United States in 1952 alone, the epidemic’s peak year.

In putting together a timeline recently of the Pitt polio vaccine team’s research progress, Youngner said, “I relived the frenzy that captured us as we approached closer and closer to success. And I was amazed at the speed with which we achieved our goal.”

Stage and screen legend Mickey Rooney, one of Hollywood’s most ardent champions of polio research, and his wife, Jan Rooney, performed during “Remembering Polio: A Tribute to Pittsburgh’s Own Polio Pioneers,” an April 10 community celebration of the 50th anniversary of the announcement that the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent.” Other guests at the event, held in the Cathedral of Learning’s Commons Room, included members of the Pittsburgh community who, as school children, were among the first 15,000 to be inoculated in local field trials of the Salk vaccine. Their efforts, together with those of many medical professionals, lab staff, caregivers, and volunteers, paved the way for the largest U.S. clinical trial ever conducted, with 1.8 million children in 44 states taking part.

Today, said Youngner, “what we accomplished would take much longer than the six years, 1949 to 1955, we needed. It is difficult to estimate how much longer, but surely longer by years.” (During the break following his lecture, Youngner later told reporters that a friend from the pharmaceutical industry informed Youngner that the Pitt vaccine probably would have taken 12 to 16 years to develop and license under today’s stricter regulations for laboratory and clinical studies. “That shocked even me,” said Youngner, who estimated that a 10-year delay in licensing the vaccine would have meant at least an additional one million polio victims in the United States alone. “Our care facilities, our rehabilitation facilities would today be overflowing” with those victims, Youngner said.)

“Let me state a strong disclaimer,” he told his lecture audience. “There is no going back to the standards, or lack of standards, of the 1950s, nor would I want to. On the basis of much experience since then, we have in place rules and regulations that at times may seem cumbersome, but which are necessary to protect the public, as well as the integrity of medical research.”

Youngner, at age 84 a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry in Pitt’s School of Medicine, summarized differences between academic science in the 1950s and today.

“First, in the 1950s there was no federally mandated Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Pittsburgh, or probably anywhere else in the United States,” he noted. “Today, the Institutional Review Board would have to review and approve the protocols for any studies that would involve humans, including safety of the vaccine, production protocols, as well as the thoroughness and honesty of the consent forms parents and adults would have to sign. In the 1950s, our sole review was conducted by the medical director of the National Foundation [for Infantile Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes] and its committee on immunization. It should be noted that this committee was an advisory ad hoc group with no veto power.

“In the 1950s there were no OSHA standards for laboratory safety. We had no laminar flow hoods to protect us from aerosolized infected materials; we didn’t use safety glasses or surgical gloves when obtaining or processing infected tissue or blood. … We weren’t tuberculin tested every six months to ensure we hadn’t been infected by any monkeys that were suffering from tuberculosis. Those of us who handled human blood samples were not vaccinated against hepatitis B, a virus which probably occurred in some of the samples we obtained.

Tenley Albright, a Harvard University surgeon and researcher, spoke during the April 10 event. Despite a childhood bout with polio, Albright went on to become, in 1956, the first American woman Olympic gold medalist in figure skating.

“Thinking about the lack of safety protocols in the old days and today’s safety requirements makes me feel that our techniques must have been extraordinarily good, because none of us got sick.”

In the 1950s, Youngner continued, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as it functions today did not yet exist. “If it had,” he said, “the Food and Drug Administration would have had jurisdiction over many of the protocols we used and a large say in the progress of our work. An FDA committee on immunization seriously divided about the potential safety and effectiveness of a killed polio vaccine would not have allowed a layman with a potential conflict of interest, namely Basil O’Connor, the president of the National Foundation that funded our work, to settle the issue.

“In addition, after the announcement on April 12, 1955, the FDA would have been the agency responsible for licensing for general use the polio vaccines being made by several pharmaceutical companies that had entered the market. … As it was, on April 12, immediately after the announcement of the vaccine’s success, the National Foundation put together an ad hoc committee in Ann Arbor, Mich. This committee, with some dissent, voted to recommend the licensing of the vaccine for general use and passed this recommendation on to the federal authorities. Within hours, Oveta Culp Hobby, then Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, gave her OK, and the vaccine went on the market for general distribution.”

At right: Youngner autographs a 1950s photograph of himself with Jonas Salk (wearing glasses). The photo appears on page 213 of Robert C. Alberts’ Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh 1787-1987.

Still another difference between then and now, Youngner pointed out: In the 1950s there were no federally mandated Animal Care Regulations. “Today, every research institution that uses animals, be it monkeys or mice or whatever, has to answer to a local animal care committee and a resident veterinarian,” he said. “There are many forms to fill out in order to certify compliance with strict regulations for the housing, feeding, and humane treatment of animals used in research.”

Nor would contemporary researchers be allowed to test a vaccine on mentally disabled residents of a state facility, as the Pitt polio team did in 1952 at the Polk State School, said Youngner and David M. Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005) during a briefing session for reporters following Youngner’s lecture. “Although, I must say, there may have been extenuating circumstances at Polk School,” Youngner noted, “because they had had some cases of polio in the school the summer before [the vaccine was tested there], so they were worried. … They were afraid of another outbreak.”

In recruiting volunteers to be injected with the Salk vaccine during field trials, Pitt polio researchers benefited not just from widespread fear of the disease but also from 1950s Americans’ nearly unquestioning faith in medical science in the 1950s, Youngner and Oshinsky agreed.

“I think the public would be much more suspicious today than they were then,” said Youngner. “The public’s faith in medical science has really taken some blows in the last decades. It’s affected even the way that parents look at vaccines today, with some trepidation and suspicion, because of publicity about bad effects of one vaccine or another. … It’s too bad, because if this [parental resistance to vaccinating their children] goes on too long, and it’s too widespread, we’re going to see the return of diseases that had been eradicated or virtually eradicated in this country.”

The recent spread of polio from certain provinces of Nigeria—where some imams had spread rumors that polio vaccination was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim men—to neighboring countries is a lesson for the rest of the world, including the United States, said Youngner. “What it says is that even if you have eradicated polio in your own country, as long as there is polio disease anywhere in the world that’s still infecting and paralyzing children, your children are at risk. Because, how long does it take for an airplane to travel from Lagos, Nigeria, to New York City? Twelve hours? As long as the disease exists anywhere in the world, we cannot be complacent and stop vaccinating our children.”

The threat of complacency notwithstanding, the Pitt polio team’s great achievement is that most people today “see polio as a vaccine and not as a disease,” said Oshinsky. “The beauty of what Dr. Salk and Dr. Youngner and the team here in Pittsburgh achieved, together with scientists across the United States, is that they made polio something that we don’t have to think about very much.”