Medicine: Another Vaccine

Only 55 years ago great, meticulous Louis Pasteur (1822-95) began to realize that for every infectious disease there is a specific microorganism. That year chicken cholera was Pasteur’s obsession. Dishes of the virus lay all around his Pans laboratory. Then, in the midst of his research he dashed away on a vacation. The virus died, but Pasteur did not know that.

Upon his return Pasteur injected some of the dead virus into a healthy chicken. Nothing happened. Astonished, he prepared a fresh batch of virulent virus and injected it into the same chicken. Nothing happened—because the erroneous mnoculation with dead virus had immunized the chicken against cholera.

Pasteur thus by accident discovered the principle of preventive innovation against infectious disease. For the firs time someone could explain why pus from a calf’s poxy sores prevented smallpox in human beings.

Just 50 years ago this coming July Pasteur first used a vaccine on a human being. It was rabies vaccine, which Pasteur administered to Joseph Meister an Alsatian child chewed by a mad dog. The boy recovered, and bacteriologists began to invent vaccines, the moment they dicovered the cause and method of transmission of a disease.

Invention continues. Last autumn Dr. Tohn Albert Kolmer of Philadelphia and Drs. William Hallock Park and Maurice Brodie of Manhattan announced vaccines against infantile paralysis. Last month Dr Albert Paul Krueger of the University of California announced a vaccine against the common cold.

And last week Professor Lloyd Derr Felton of Harvard went to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where once he studied and taught, to say that a pneumonia vaccine which he invented seemed to be valid. He had given the vaccine to 3,000 people, including himself. Not one had developed pneumonia, although in the ordinary course of life ten or a dozen of them should have contracted the disease.