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Grantee Kessel was able to pass this peculiar infantile paralysis to monkeys, and propagate it in these animals. And he found that this mildness of the southern California virus was characteristic, too, of the disease in monkeys. Yet he has proved that this mild disease is surely infantile paralysis. For monkeys that have recovered only partly paralyzed, from this more gentle California type of the sickness, are, seventy per cent of them, now proof against the more savage virus of infantile paralysis of the East.

Two important practical possibilities arise from these observations of Grantee Kessel. Should the attempt to wipe out infantile paralysis by the chemical blockade of children's nerves of smell be found to have limitations, or to fail, it might then be necessary to fall back upon new attempts to vaccinate them. This might become feasible, if one or another of the Commission's grantees should develop a way to spot the susceptible human being -- which is not yet proven impossible. Would it not then be very valuable, in such a project, to possess a mild infantile paralysis virus? Just, as in the case of smallpox, people are not protected by that milder form of smallpox virus, vaccinia, which is obtained from cows?

Of course it is granted that, if the field trial of zinc sulphate or some other chemical, in the attempt to block the virus from getting into children, should be successful, then the question of whether there is more than one infantile paralysis virus becomes an academic one. In short, zinc sulphate wouldn't care which virus it prevented from entering. Yet, we do not know whether this science, so brilliantly successful in monkeys, will work for man. And it is common sense for us to have, experimentally, as many strings as possible to our bow.

This peculiarity of the Southern California virus has been confirmed in the important experiments of grantees Drs. John Paul and James D. Trask, of the Yale University Medical School. One of Trask's and Paul's viruses, obtained from Southern California, while it is not very fatal for monkeys, yet exhibits this ominous trait: that it can be easily passed from one monkey to another by simply injecting it into the skin of these animals. Should this hold, too, for human beings, with new viruses in future epidemics, what then would become of our now hopeful project to protect them by spraying chemical solutions into their noses?

A group of very able investigators at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School began a year ago last fall to strike at the very heart, so to speak, of the basic scientific mystery of infantile paralysis. And already a most significant preliminary report has been rendered by these workers. They are investigating from every known angle, bacteriological, chemical, anatomical, physiological, pathological, this most basic of all the purely scientific mysteries of the disease, namely:

Is it certain that the virus of infantile paralysis is able to invade, to multiply, to attack, and to destroy, the nerve tissues of human beings and monkeys, and their nerve tissues only? Their work answers this question in the affirmative.

From almost every laboratory during the past six years has come news that would make it seem as if this is so. Yet the old idea that infantile paralysis is first a blood disease and only later attacks nerve tissues dies hard. And it still has its proponents. Yet, the most hopeful immediate attack upon the key question of preventing infantile paralysis from invading children, rests upon the new doctrine that the virus of the sickness penetrates only by way of the nerves of smell, and can survive and multiply in, and attack, nerve cells and nerve cells alone.

One could not have been in intimate contact with the work described above, without acquiring a measure of enthusiasm and hopefulness which is perhaps too evident in this resumé of scientific facts. It I seem to have stressed unduly the advances made possible by the provision of needed funds, that is not to be taken to mean that all that results depend on is plenty of money. One reading this report should always remember that after all these scientists are still attempting solutions in many cases sought by them and their predecessors without success for a period as far back as seventy-five years.

All these problems are in good hands. Work upon them can only go forward when all keep to the belief that they can be solved despite past defeats. But this does not mean that all of the answers sought are bound to be found in a given time.