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While these questions are all of them practical ones, all giving hope of ultimate answers if money for really adequate laboratory and field tests were provided, yet it was important to support researches seemingly entirely academic, not immediately practicable. Exactly what, for example, is this infantile paralysis virus? Entirely sub-visible, true. But may it not be possible to determine its exact chemistry? Other viruses, such as that of the tobacco mosaic disease, are now believed not to be microbes at all, but curiously changed proteins, giant chemical molecules that come from the tissues of the tobacco plant itself, changed in some way so as to become murderous to healthy tobacco plants.

Might not the infantile paralysis virus be only some mysteriously altered nerve tissue of human beings? Should not, therefore, a serious chemical attempt be made to purify, to refine, to determine the chemistry of this virus? So that its true origin might be determined and, maybe, controlled and suppressed by chemical means?

Finally, a group of searchers from one of the greatest of all American medical schools brought forward plans for an investigation, seemingly theoretical, which past two or three years has turned out to be the most immediately practical questions demanding and answer. Is infantile paralysis ever found in any part of the human body -- excepting the nervous tissues? Is this the Achilles heel of the virus: that it can only live, multiply, in a child's nerves, brain, spinal cord? Can it sneak into the doomed child only by way of certain exposed nerves? Does it leave sick children only by this pathway?

Although the urgency of answering all these various questions has long been known, one reason why they have remained so long unanswered is the unparalleled costliness of infantile paralysis research. This is due to the unfortunate fact that the one experimental animal susceptible to this sickness is the monkey.

Now, the average cost of a monkey, year in and year out, is about eight dollars, and this has brought it about that most laboratories have been skimped for monkeys. Years of experiment and the time of scores of able investigators have been wasted, their results vitiated by conclusions drawn from experiments based upon an utterly inadequate number of animals. Diphtheria has been all but conquered, by the use of the inexpensive guinea-pig. Great strides have been made against pneumonia, because for the study of this ill there were countless mice costing ten cents each. But this happy state of affairs has existed for only a short period of years in infantile paralysis research. This was not because monkeys did not exist; they do exist in millions to the serious embarrassment of the population of India. But they cost eight dollars.

It was this situation that led the Committee's advisory medical committee to adhere to this basic aim: that no competent investigator should have in any way to stint himself in the matter of monkeys. For, if it takes a thousand mice to clear up a given pneumonia mystery, it may likewise require a thousand monkeys to answer a given infantile paralysis question. It is this possession of adequate experimental animals on the part of grantees that has led certain of them to their notable progress in the prevention of the experimental disease in monkeys now to be recounted.

It is inherent in the adventure of science that what appears a most promising project may fail disastrously when put to the test of human use; while at the same time most pessimistic theoretical conclusions may immediately precede, in fact bring into action, a research effort whose results give promise of practical test upon human beings. This is illustrated in the recent brilliant experimental results obtained by the Commission's grantee, Dr. E. W. Schultz, of Stanford University. Thanks to funds granted by the Commission, Dr. Schultz has demonstrated a safe and powerful preventive of infantile paralysis in monkeys. It must be stated that Dr. Schultz was preceded in this work by Drs. Charles Armstrong and W. T. Harrison of the U. S. Public Health Service, and to these latter belongs the priority. Yet Dr. Schultz's work began almost simultaneously, and proceeded independently of that of Armstrong and Harrison, though its announcement followed the first publication of the Public Health Service investigators. Schultz's first publication was also preceded by an investigation confirming Armstrong's, made by Sabin, Olitsky and Cox of the Rockefeller Institute.

Dr. Schultz's previous researches, together with those of workers in England and America, had convinced him that infantile paralysis is uniquely and peculiarly a disease of nerve tissues, both in monkeys and human beings. Hidden away inside of nerve cells, propagating itself inside these cells, the virus is safe from any immune power that might be conferred upon the blood of monkeys or children by vaccines; or from any immunity that might be introduced into the blood of monkeys or children, ready-made, by the injection of so-called immune blood serum. But if the infantile paralysis virus cannot invade the brain and spinal cord of a child to begin its nerve cell wrecking activity? According to the analysis of Armstrong, and also of the Commission's grantee, Schultz, the virus had one, and only one possible path of entry. That was by way of the delicate, hairlike endings of the nerves of smell, high up in the roof of the nose. These are the only nerve tissues in children (or monkeys) which lie uncovered, naked to the outside world.