The end of World War II cleansed America of most of its greatest fears, but of the top two that persisted, according to polling at the time, one was merely hypothetical and the other all too real: nuclear destruction and polio.
In the early 1950s, polio was the walking dread of American life. It struck without warning, paralyzed tens of thousands, and vexed experts who could reach no viable conclusions about how it spread from person to person.
But in this American city, in this very week, in 1953, 39-year-old Jonas Salk went on the CBS radio network and said, effectively, “Hey, I got this.”
Whether Pittsburgh might again deliver the nation and the world its Salk-at-the-microphone moment in the coming months is a question that defies irony, but the fact that Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research is among a triumvirate of global laboratories commissioned by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to develop a vaccine against coronavirus is not so much coincidence as the result of decades of the university’s scientific dedication and innovation.
The effort is led by Institut Pasteur in Paris in collaboration with Themis, the Austrian biotechnology lab, plus the virologists and researchers working mostly anonymously adjacent to Fifth Avenue in Oakland.
“There are virologists all around the world who have been trained for this moment,” said Paul Duprex, the director at Pitt and its Jonas Salk Chair for Vaccine Research at a press conference recently. “We have colleagues in many parts of the world who collaborate and work with us to share information and share knowledge because this is important.”
You don’t have to look far to understand how important, even as some still don’t. The streets are empty, there are hospital tents in New York’s Central Park, and the fear in the atmosphere probably can’t be quantified even with advanced polling and metrics.
Every world citizen has a part to play in helping humanity get out from beneath this pandemic, and no one should doubt there will be heroes of all stripes in that victory, but our MVP will be a scientist.
Science may have faded from fashion in the broader culture and been virtually laughed off the stage by political philistines the world over, but it will be a scientist of capacious skill and courage that lights the way out of this cavern. Perhaps it will be required that he or she flash the same stone cold bravery of Salk himself.
In the months prior to his March 25, 1953, radio broadcast and his article that appeared two days later in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Salk summoned into a Pittsburgh kitchen one night his wife and three children, who found him boiling syringes on the stove top. All five Salks got a shot before anyone knew for sure it was safe, much less that it would work. So did the kids at Arsenal Elementary School.
Trials began the next year, and by 1955 polio was on its way out. Salk became an international celebrity, a fact not lost on the late great Pitt sports publicist Beano Cook. When Pitt basketball star Don Hennon was making national headlines in 1958, Cook tried to get Salk and Hennon together for a photo above the cutline, “The two greatest shot-makers of all-time.”
Salk demurred.
Frustratingly, 60-plus years of scientific advancements have left us at a station where the development of a vaccine still requires a lot more time and patience than knocking together a bookshelf from Ikea. The research teams involved on a coronavirus vaccine were still shooting at April for generating a candidate vaccine ready for animal testing in Paris and Pittsburgh. This will be complemented by the development of an aerosol model of COVID-19 disease at the Center for Vaccine Research. By the end of the year, 60 to 80 human volunteers at multiple sites will have gotten the vaccine.
The work at Pitt is particularly delicate because it involves designing animal testing protocols requiring special biocontainment measures for the safe handling of potentially lethal airborne pathogens.
There are legions of scientists taking such risks daily, and dozens of qualified private and academic labs working diligently on similar processes. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation called for $2 billion in funding the first week in March, with the goal of generating at least three vaccine candidates for use in the pandemic.
We can’t help but be proud of Pitt’s work on this, but clearly it matters not from where or whom we get our Salk moment. Only that we get it.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: March 31, 2020, 10:30 a.m.
