Julius S. Youngner (left), the only surviving member of Jonas Salk’s core polio vaccine research team, shakes hands with Peter S. Salk, vice president and scientific director of the Jonas Salk Foundation and the eldest of Salk’s three sons, during the April 12 dedication of a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission marker that will be placed at the corner of Terrace Street and Sutherland Drive, outside Salk Hall. The marker reads: “Pioneering research here at the University of Pittsburgh’s Virus Research Laboratory from 1948 to 1955 produced the world’s first polio vaccine. Led by Dr. Jonas Salk, researchers’ innovations resulted in a breakthrough that was announced on April 12, 1955. Subsequent inoculations of school children virtually eradicated polio in the United States by 1962.”

“When I was a child, summers were always tense” because of the threat of polio, Julius S. Youngner recalled in his April 11 keynote lecture during Pitt’s “Remembering Polio” scientific symposium.

“Reports of paralyzed children appeared in the news, and parents began to protect and isolate their children,” Youngner said. “Swimming pools, movie theaters, crowds of any sort were off limits. However, in contrast to many other children, I was never housebound. My grandmother had an infallible preventative.”

Every morning before the young Youngner went out to play, his grandmother would hang around his neck a cloth bag containing a small cake of camphor, normally used to keep moths from eating woolens. Youngner said his grandmother “was convinced until the day she died that the camphor had protected me from polio. What I never told her was that when I left the house to play, I took the bag off and put it in the mailbox. There it stayed until I returned home and hung it back on my neck.”

Youngner, of course, would go on to become a senior scientist on the Pitt research team that created the first safe and effective polio vaccine. He was recruited for the team in 1949 by its leader, Jonas Salk. While the two men had both lived in Ann Arbor during the early 1940s—Youngner as a graduate student in the University of Michigan medical school, Salk as a faculty member of the university’s public health school—they did not meet face-to-face until spring 1948, when Youngner invited Salk to his home for dinner and to discuss Salk’s fledgling research program in Pittsburgh.

“There is one incident that stands out in my mind about that evening,” Youngner remembered. “When I arrived home after work, my wife reminded me that I had forgotten to put the beer in the refrigerator, and so I put several cans of beer in the freezer to cool them off quickly. Sometime later, when Jonas had arrived, we were all standing in the kitchen while dinner was being prepared. I offered beer to all, got the cans out of the freezer—and sprayed the whole kitchen, including our guest, with beer when I opened the first can.

“The rest of the dinner,” Youngner deadpanned, “was uneventful.”

David M. Oshinsky (left), author of Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005) and a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, with Julius S. Youngner, during a briefing with reporters following Youngner’s keynote lecture.

Not amusing—at all—was the rivalry between Salk’s research team, working feverishly to develop a killed-virus polio vaccine, and critics who argued instead for a live-virus vaccine. In 1952, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later renamed the March of Dimes) set up a Committee on Immunization to advise on which type of vaccine the foundation should champion.

“The committee was composed of some of the most prestigious and competent medical virologists and epidemiologists in the country,” Youngner said. “Not least in this group, and probably the most vocal, was Albert Sabin. It would take more time than I have available to provide you with an account of the obstacles that this committee kept erecting to slow down, or even stop, the march to a killed polio vaccine. To summarize, the dogma that many on the committee defended was that a killed virus vaccine would never work, and that the only effective vaccine to prevent polio would be a live, attenuated virus vaccine, one that Sabin was actively trying to develop in his lab. This dogma was based on the two most successful virus vaccines that were in use at the time, vaccines against smallpox and yellow fever, both of them composed of live, attenuated viruses. Needless to say, the killed polio vaccine won that battle, mainly because Basil O’Connor, president of the National Foundation, believed in it and gave Jonas his unequivocal support.”

Youngner described what he called an incident that illustrates vividly how Albert Sabin felt about Jonas Salk.

“The year is 1986,” Youngner said, “more than 30 years after the killed vaccine was licensed. The setting is a celebration in Washington, D.C., of Albert Sabin’s 80th birthday. After a daylong scientific symposium in his honor at the National Institutes of Health, the guests moved to the Cosmos Club for dinner. After dinner there were laudatory speeches made about Albert Sabin and his career. I was there as president of the American Society for Virology to deliver a tribute to the guest of honor from the virologists of the country.

“After all the tributes, including mine, had been delivered, Sabin rose to speak. He talked at length about his efforts to develop a live-virus vaccine. At one point, he described the meeting at which he gave the first report of the success of his live vaccine to a prestigious group of scientists.” Sabin then proceeded to recognize those scientists by name. But when he spotted Youngner in the audience, he came to a dead stop and seemed to be grasping for a name.

Finally, after a few seconds, Sabin apparently recovered, pointed to Youngner, and said: “You know, Juli Youngner’s old boss.”

“He did the same thing at another point in his speech,” Youngner recalled. “Albert Sabin could hold a grudge. After 30 years had passed, Albert Sabin still could not let the words ‘Jonas Salk’ pass his lips.”

Ironically, both sides in the live- versus killed-virus vaccine battle have been vindicated. “Both vaccines are needed to keep poliomyelitis at bay and eventually eradicated,” Youngner pointed out. “Without the live, attenuated vaccine, the worldwide eradication of polio would probably never have been undertaken, or if it had, the task would have been more arduous, expensive, and difficult. The killed vaccine is more expensive and requires multiple injections using needles and syringes, both of which continue to upset children and their parents. Oral administration of the attenuated vaccine, a few drops of fluid into the open mouth of a child, is a less traumatic event for the child as well as the parents. However, a low frequency of paralytic polio is associated with the use of the live attenuated virus.

“I must point out that the killed virus vaccine is now the mainstay in the United States and other countries where poliomyelitis has been eradicated,” said Youngner. “It is a rare outcome to scientific controversies that both sides are vindicated, but the emotional and scientific battle of live versus killed polio vaccine is one of these instances.”