to the mirror again to read the answer, written backwards and upside down on the bottom of the note. You smell the peanuts on its breath. I smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so clever. It occurs to me, too, what a long time it took for her to write it this way. And, she wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble unless I needed it.
When the nurse comes to straighten my bed and take my temperature, I look up into her face. I study the way her eyes will not meet mine. There, yes, I see it. How do you know that something very serious is happening to you? You see it in the faces of those who take care of you.
•
But what I do not know is what this serious thing is doing to America. I do not know that since the birth of our country, American medical schools have focused on turning out bedside physicians. Break-through medical discoveries were the pride of Europe, where basic research was encouraged. France, in particular, became renowned for discovering cures for horrible diseases. But in America, it was not until John D. Rockefeller’s three-year-old grandson was dying of scarlet fever—which had no known treatment or cure—that the value of research was made indelibly clear. Rockefeller offered a physician half a million dollars to save his grandson and then poured his grief into opening the first private research institute in the country. Now polio, another untreatable illness, was driving thousands of parents to insist on finding a cure.
On the counters of stores, I had seen cards with dimes fitted into slots. I had been in plenty of movies when the lights had come up and the plate passed for the March of Dimes. But what I do not know is how, for the first time in American history, citizens are banding together—everyday, ordinary people, not the government, not private, wealthy individuals, but instead mothers and fathers of regular kids like me—to go door-to-door, calling on neighbors, collecting the means to fund a cure. This time, ordinary citizens are funding scientists to solve the mysteries. The poliovirus is changing America.
Mysteries—such as in an epidemic in Connecticut, in l943, when a nine-year-old girl who is barely sick comes into the hospital. Dr. Dorothy Horstman, curious about her, finds— much to her astonishment—evidence of the poliovirus in the girl’s bloodstream. So, over the next seven years, Dr. Horstman conducts research on chimpanzees, figuring out, finally, that doctors have simply been looking for the virus in the bloodstream too late. Its viremic phase exists only before physical symptoms appear. Now one of the most important parts of the polio puzzle has been solved, meaning the possibility of making a vaccine is, indeed, more than a hunch. And the search for one takes on the feel of a race.
•
In studies of childhood it is said that the years of six to twelve are Latency—a period of supposed calm when the base instincts of early childhood are under control so the child is pronounced educable and sent to school. It is the time when fantasy and dreams are weapons to undo humiliations and hard knocks. Deprive a child of his fantasies and dreams, and he is forever stunted. The business of six to twelve is to latch onto the idea of who we will become: Indian, Cowboy, Gangster, Thief, Fireman, Housewife, Movie Star, Chief. Supposedly symbols shepherd our sanity. It is the symbols in our stories that thread our lives together so the fabric can hold. My mind was holding onto its symbols like a modern-day fist wrapped around a credit card.
•
My father comes to stand outside the window of the ward. Dressed in a tan suit and wearing a hat like a leading man in a movie, he smiles and waves. His teeth are as white as an unmailed envelope. He hates what is happening to me. He’d rather stay home, tending to my brother. And from now on, he mostly will. I know that if I ask him to slip in to me a bottle of ketchup, he will. And he’d never say a word about it, either.
He is a typical father of the 1950s—as solid as a rock, as silent as granite.
4
SALK AND SABIN BEAT THE SYSTEM
Jonas Salk was born the same year as my father. He was the oldest of three brothers and the son of Jewish parents who immigrated to New York City from Russia, who convinced him that education was the ticket to a good life in America, and so he better get on with the books.
When he is only twelve, he enters a public high school for gifted students. He goes to the City College of New York a month right before he turns sixteen and signs up for pre-law, but nearly flunks: a D in French, a C in English, a B in history. He switches to pre-med. And here is where he feels a spark. Here, he feels his seemingly insatiable curiosity being fed. One answer leads to another question. And another question leads to a theory that can then be tested by an experiment; and if that fails, another question arises, and if that answer works, then on and on into boundless arenas, throwing light on one disease and sometimes another, each playing a part in a lifesaving cure. Maybe. And that maybe is critical because maybe means possible, and possible is everything.
When he is ready for medical school, Salk finds a dumb, disturbing rule: Most schools will accept no more than five Jews, two Catholics, and no blacks. New York University does not discriminate against Jews, and Salk applies and is accepted. He studies virology. When he graduates, he works tirelessly in the field of flu research, which fascinates him with its seemingly endless strains. The need is urgent, too. The recent 1918 worldwide flu epidemic has killed millions.
Albert Sabin, eight years older than Jonas Salk, comes with his parents from Poland, to escape the murderous pogroms that killed Jews after World War I. They settle in New Jersey. Sabin is a sophomore in high school but speaks no English. Sabin gets across the idea to his school principal that he wants to be in the tenth grade. The principal agrees, but warns that if Sabin flunks the tenth grade, he will have to start all over, maybe even down in elementary school. Sabin passes and, while learning English, reads two books that work magic on who he wishes to become. Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis bring to life the intellectual adventures of basic medical scientists, and if the stories romanticize curing diseases a bit and diminish the frustration and grueling work involved, Sabin does not notice, or care. His problem is his uncle. The uncle, a dentist, has his own ideas of who Sabin should be, and offers to pay Sabin’s tuition and all expenses through dental school. The catch is that Sabin will go, then return to take over the uncle’s practice.
The deal appeals to Sabin. He enters dental school, but rather quickly finds the subject nearly bores him out of his everlovin’ mind. Yet, he can’t shake his fascination with science and the possibility of solving problems rooted in biology and disease. He quits dental school; his uncle cuts him off; the dean of the New York University Medical School comes to Sabin’s rescue, giving him a scholarship, paying for his food and rent and finding him a job at Harlem Hospital working with pneumonia patients. There, Sabin develops a way of typing pneumococci, the germ that causes pneumonia, thereby providing a quick means to destroy it, and he is on his way to becoming a renowned virologist. Viruses, he finds, are endlessly fascinating. Stubbornness, his dominant trait, is his magic. Once he catches hold of a problem, he shakes it silly.
Now with both Drs. Salk and Sabin taking on the search for a vaccine to prevent the poliovirus infection, mistakes are worth a second look. And a stunning assumption has misled research for decades. Simply, researchers have been running experiments on the wrong monkey. The rhesus monkey, the first chosen, has been found to be the only monkey not to “catch” the virus through the mouth.
Because polio was a human disease and animals did not “catch” it, researchers had to “give” the illness to some living being in order to study it. Running experiments on humans was not a possibility. Children could not be put at such risk. So the mistake took root when a researcher fed the polio virus to a rhesus monkey that did not get sick. Yet, when the researcher shot the virus into the monkey’s brain and spinal cord, the virus thrived there. Eventually, this type of rhesus monkey would be found to be the only one not to contract the virus through the mouth.
