LIVE POLIO IRUS VACCINES

Discussion
599
the people in a few of the more advanced countries,
it is not, for over three quarters of the
world's children. Some 80 to 85 million babies
are being born each year into a world heavily
infected with dangerous paralytic strains of
poliovirus. The great mass of these are not being,
and will not be, protected by a vaccine which.is
expensive and has to be injected. The needs of
other peoples can be better appreciated if we
visualize what our attitude would be towards live
poliovirus vaccines were the Salk vaccine nonexistent.
I consider it a privilege, Mr. Chairman, to have
had an opportunity to address this Conference,
and I wish to thank you for this opportunity.
DR. SABIN: In reply to Dr. Langmuir, I hope
that Cincinnati will not long remain an isolated
island.
Furthermore, I regard the United States as a
very advanced country, and in this advanced
country, in 1959, there were about 6,000 cases of
paralytic poliomyelitis reported, 1,000 of them
among children who had three doses of Salk
vaccine.
Now, I am highly gratified that it was not
18,000, which it might have been if it had not
been for Salk vaccine; certainly 6,000 is much
less. But I maintain that this is 6,000 cases too
many, even for an advanced country, if there is
something we can do about it.
To be satisfied that there are only 6,000 instead
of 18,000 paralytic cases is no stand to take
for an advanced country.
DR. SMADEL: I should like to change the subject
slightly. In the closing moments of the Conference
last year, 1 complimented the participants
saying that they formed a bold and courageous
group. Now, a year later, it is of this courageous
group that I should like to ask a question, as an
individual scientist, not as a member of a government
agency.
How long, in this group, shall we continue to
be bound by the prejudices among our colleagues
who work in the field of virology and in the
cancer field, who insist that we must make vaccines
from primary cultures of simian tissue?
This is a key question, because the state of the
art is such now that one could grow tissue cultures
in large tanks using continuous line cells
capable of supporting the growth of poliovirus;
moreover, this could be done very cheaply.
I speak with some feeling on this matter, because
on several occasions, since the time, five or
six years ago, when Dr. Hilleman and I proposed
using HeLa cells to prepare live adeno-vaccine, I
have had my brow bloodied by the cancerologists
who have insisted that one or another of the
theoretical factors which might exist in a continuous
cell line, could possibly induce cancer in
man.
This is the sort of an argument which can never
be settled by talk. It is a philosophical point
which one may or may not believe. My final
rebuttal in this argument, which was as useless
as most rebuttals, was that if those in the cancer
feld believed this, then they had the opportunity
to do the most important experiment of the century
and to prove the point.
But I still have not, as a scientist, been able to
convince anybody, or at least a jury of my peers,
that I could make a vaccine, live or dead, in a
continuous line cell culture and judicially use
this in man.
My challenge, gentlemen, is this: among us,
are there any bold enough to do this experiment?
We shall never settle it philosophically; it will
be settled only by acting.