Our Remarkable Wexford Neighbor: Dr. Jonas Salk

I’ve spent most of this week in the hospital. My husband was having hip replacement surgery, and I was his head cheerleader and go-fer. He was released yesterday and is gamely learning to master the crutches, sleep in an unnaturally straight-legged position, and deal with the pain. Because of my preoccupation with medical matters, I thought I’d write this week about the worst epidemic in our young lives. And how it was successfully vanquished a little over 50 years ago--in our hometown of Pittsburgh by a man living in our midst.

In my posting for April 12, I reprinted the Allegheny Journal article mentioning that the famed virologist Jonas Salk spoke at the dedication of North Allegheny High School in October 1954. Last year I read Jeffrey Kluger’s book Splendid Solution (2004, Penguin paperback) about the conquest of polio by Dr. Salk and his research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Ames Public Library had selected it for a book club discussion led by a local physician. Knowing about the connection between N. Allegheny and Salk, my curiosity was whetted. A big crowd attended the discussion, and I was fascinated by the stories people of around my age told about surviving the disease or watching their siblings suffer from it and their parents deal with the aftermath.

The fear poliomyelitis (aka infantile paralysis) engendered in my family those summers of my young life (1947-1953) is still a vivid memory. It must have been especially hellish for new parents to see their infants, who were quite healthy one day, develop fever, chills, labored breathing, and eventually useless limbs in a matter of hours or days.

An Egyptian tomb carving from the 18^th dynasty of a boy with a dropped foot, an atrophied leg, and a walking stick suggests the disease may have been around for 4000 years. In the U.S., 1916 was a particularly bad year in eastern cities. Afflicted children were taken from their parents to isolation facilities where they stayed until they either died or recovered and returned home once they were no longer a danger to anyone else.

In 1952, my husband’s parents, who had recently arrived in Lancaster, Pa. from a displaced persons camp in Germany, were so worried about the safety of their young sons that they sent them out to the country for the summer to the farm of a fellow Latvian, where they thought the air would be better. Water was also suspected as the carrier of the polio virus (enlarged at the right). One summer when several classmates at Ingomar School got sick, my mother nixed all trips to North Park swimming pool for me, believing Windwood in Bradford Woods to be less dangerous.

Of course, the “poster child” for polio wasn’t a child at all, but the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. He contracted polio at age 39 in August 1921 after visiting a Boy Scout jamboree during a vacation at Campobello Island. Until 1945, when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, he never regained the use of his legs; his struggle with the disease contributed to public awareness and to financial support for polio research from the March of Dimes (over $2.5 million). FDR's personality also aided the perception that polio could be conquered.

Those photos of the poor kids consigned to iron lungs with only their heads visible were poignant images to me. “Iron lung” was just the common name for the negative pressure ventilator that mimicked the physiological action of breathing: by periodically altering pressure, it caused air to flow in and out of weakened lungs.

The Local Angle

Kluger’s book traces the life of Jonas Salk (1914 -1995). He was born in New York City, the eldest of three sons of Russian Jewish immigrants from Minsk (Belarus) who were garment workers. An intense, no-nonsense boy, Jonas attended City College of New York and NYU Medical School in pursuit of a career in medical research. After graduation and an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, he spent 5 years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan developing an influenza vaccine in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis (who received most of the recognition for this achievement).

This slight rankled Salk, and when he was offered a position in virology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School, he accepted immediately. The salary of $7,500 a year was 50% more than he had been paid at Michigan. It was also his chance to build his own lab. He didn’t decide to focus on creating a vaccine to prevent polio until after he started in autumn 1947.

What amazes me was the decision by Jonas and his wife Donna to rent a house at the intersection of Perry Highway and Maple Drive in Wexford. Jonas had his heart set on a home in the country with his own vegetable garden. In those days how many New York Jews chose such a gentile stronghold as the northern suburbs as a place to settle? And why would someone who spent 12+ hours per day in his lab in Oakland want to take on that commute? (Remember in those days there wasn’t even McKnight Road, let alone Rt. 279.) It wasn’t for the school system because Salk drove his sons to Sewickley Academy in his Studebaker on the way to the lab. And when would he have time to tend a garden anyway?

Although the cases of polio in the U.S. more than doubled between 1945 and 1946, the summers between 1947 and 1951 were even worse. Finally 1952 broke all records—57,879 cases reported. That summer things were so bad in Pittsburgh even attendance at Forbes Field dropped. But Salk and his team were closing in on an effective vaccine. He was confident enough of its safety that among the first children in the entire country to be inoculated were his own three sons—Peter (9), Darrell (6), and Jonathan (3). Salk brought his kit bag of syringes home and the first administering of the wonder vaccine occurred inWexford.

After 6 years, in autumn 1953 when the demands of the lab were especially heavy and field trails of the vaccine were underway, the Salks left Wexford and moved to a house 7 minutes from the lab. Still, Salk had a soft spot for his old neighborhood. Despite his grueling schedule, he agreed to be dedication speaker for our new high school.

I recommend Kluger’s book if you are interested in the details of how medical breakthroughs are made and the personalities and politics involved. Throughout the course of vaccine development, the rivalry between Salk and the older, imperious researcher Albert Sabin is described. Eventually Sabin’s live-virus vaccine administered orally supplanted Salk’s killed-virus injections. In 1962, Salk left Pittsburgh and moved to La Jolla, California, where he established the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (taking some of his Pittsburgh colleagues with him). There he worked until his death (age 80) in 1995 on more polio vaccine research as well as studying multiple sclerosis and AIDS.

In 2000, after his death, the Center for Disease Control ruled that to eliminate the final lingering cases of polio in the U.S., Sabin’s vaccine would be phased out and replaced by Salk’s more effective killed formulation. The polio virus is nearly extinct today, and those scary epidemic years of our childhood now a dusty corner of medical history. (Incidentally, Jonas never received a Nobel Prize but he was rewarded by his three adoring sons all becoming physicians. They still live and work on the West Coast.

NAHS’s Contribution

My husband’s recent hospital sojourn made me think of the women in the Class of 1958 who chose nursing as a career. It is a vital, care-giving service rarely portrayed adequately on TV hospital series like “E.R.,” “House,” or “Chicago Hope,” where doctors, residents and interns dominate the speaking roles and nurses occasionally provide love interest but that’s all. We hear of the nursing shortage, the lack of proper funding for nursing schools, and the baby boomers will soon require more health care.

I knew early on that I was not made of the stern stuff that is required to tackle such a career, but I am deeply grateful to my classmates who were. I want to salute them: Norma Darling Goettmann, Carol Dingfelder Renner, Pat Henke Sexauer, Kathy Humphreys Oswald, Karen O’Connell Loeber, Judy Roth Morris, Grace “Rusty” Sherman, Ruth Ann Slack Scuticchio, Lois Sloan Mounsey, and Susan Tate Hurley. (Please let me know if I’ve forgotten anyone.)