... the scientific community may already be experiencing a gradual departure from the traditional scientific standards ...
In this way we risk sliding down toward the standards of some other professions where the validity of action is decided by whether one can get away with it.
For science to drift toward such a course would be fatal -- not only to itself and the inspiration which carries it forward, but to the public trust which is its provider
Encouraged by prominent scientists, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 1987 began a review of the institutional response to cases of alleged or suspected scientific misconduct by scientists involved in Federally supported research. At that time, the problem was readily discernible.
When situations of possible scientific misconduct arose, the institution's response generally was to walk the whistleblower out the door, sweep the problems under the rug, and to protect, at all costs, the reputations of the senior scientists. As one scientist explained, "It was as if they had their own fiefdoms whereby they set their own rules."
The Gallo case, more clearly than any other of which we are aware, reveals the way that academic, scientific, and government institutions mishandle allegations of misconduct committed by senior scientists. The case is additionally important because of its implications for public health.
As it happens, equatorial Africa was the site of the world's first mass trials of an oral polio vaccine -- a vaccine cultured in monkey kidneys but different in at least one important respect from the Sabin vaccine ultimately adopted worldwide. This footnote in medical history took place from 1957 to 1960 right in the middle of what was then the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi -- the epicenter of the future African AIDS epidemic. It was developed by a naturalized American polio researcher named Hilary Koprowski -- the same Dr. Koprowski who four years later would warn congressmen of the dangers of an almost infinite number of monkey viruses contaminating polio vaccines.
Hilary Koprowski, the developer of the vaccines used in the Congo, is a charming, deep-voiced man of seventy-five. Born and educated in Poland, where he studied to be a concert pianist while going to medical school, Koprowski began work for Lederle Laboratories in 1946. Like Salk and Sabin he took up the cause of saving the world from polio. He tested weakened strains of the virus in monkeys and chimps and in March 1951 surprised a meeting of polio researchers sponsored by the March of Dimes in Hershey, Pennsylvania. There he revealed that he had become the first physician in history to administer a polio vaccine to humans. The "volunteer" research subjects for Koprowski's live, weakened polio vaccine included twenty children he later described as "mentally deficient" who lived in Letchworth Village, a facility operated by the New York State Department of Mental Health. Later he vaccinated other groups of children, among them the newborn babies of institutionalized women in New Jersey.
Koprowski arranged to have his weakened polio viruses tested in a colony of 150 chimpanzees in Camp Lindi at Stanleyville, in the Belgian Congo (now Kisangu, Zaire). To protect the animals' caretakers, these humans, too, were fed the weakened virus. The successful immunization of the keepers then became the justification for the mass vaccination trials in the Congo itself --the first mass trials in the history of an oral polio vaccine.
Called by drums, rural Africans traveled to village assembly points. There they lined up and had a liquid vaccine squirted into their mouths. Using this spray method, nearly a quarter million Africans were innoculated in six weeks. Later another 75,000 or so children in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, got the vaccine, too --though European children living there apparently received their vaccine in capsure form, possibly a significant variation.
From the beginning, Koprowski's campaign was marked by controversy. _Trial by Fury_, Aaron Klein's 1972 account of the development of the polio vaccines, reports that Koprowski apparently claimed he had the backing of the World Health Organization, but the
WHO denied sanctioning the claim. Koprowski says today that although he was challenged by WHO, he needed only the approval of the Belgian authorities -- and there's no doubt he had that. Other preparations of Koprowski's polio vaccines were later used in Poland, Yugoslavia and Switzerland, among other places.
Herald Cox, Koprowski's superior at Lederle, had begun growing the polio virus in developing embryos in chicken eggs. Early on, Koprowski also used the brains of cotton rats to select his weakened strains and nurture the virus. But by 1956 and 1957, when he was readying his vaccine for use in the Congo, Koprowski had long since switched to minced-up monkey kidneys.
Monkey kidneys contained innumerable monkey viruses. Might the one that causes AIDS be one of them? And if it were, would Koprowski's method of delivery -- shooting liquid into people's mouths -- be capable of transferring the virus from monkeys to humans ?
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