Splendid Solution:
Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
by Jeffrey Kluger
reviewed by David Loftus
[This review appeared in the
Oregonian on Jan. 23, 2005.]
The discovery of the polio vaccine seems an unpromisingly well-told tale.
But Jeffrey Kluger has a good reason for Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Salk's breakthrough. The World Health Organization has targeted this year to eradicate the virus from the planet (a few hundred cases linger in Nigeria, Pakistan and India), and the Smithsonian plans a retrospective exhibition.
For a long time the disease was a scourge on our shores. When Salk was a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City, in 1916, more than 6,000 Americans died of polio. Many more permanently lost the use of limbs. Though the numbers rose and fell, they averaged much the same for the next 40 years.
City vehicles wrested possibly sick children from their mothers and took them away to quarantine. Summer holiday events were cancelled when the plague swept cities. Ignorance fed wild rumors such as one that blamed cats whereupon 72,000 of the poor creatures were beaten, drowned and otherwise slaughtered by the citizens of New York.
Salk graduated from a high school for the gifted at 15 and entered medical school by 20. During World War II, he was part of the team that developed the first flu vaccine. Detail-oriented to the point of obsessiveness, he was more polite and attentive to waiters and repairmen than to peers who could do him political good.
Though muted, Splendid Solution has its suspenseful turns and thrills. Competitors swore by a weakened live-virus vaccine while Salk pursued a killed-virus approach -- carefully murdering yet structurally preserving the deadly cells to goose the body's immune response. Test vaccines by other researchers failed, leaving dead children and ruined careers in their wake. Drug companies "improved" the vaccine Salk's team already perfected, which resulted in more polio cases.
As an army of 20,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses, 1,000 support staff, 14,000 school principals, and 50,000 teachers prepared to launch the national field test that would involve 1.8 million children in 1954, Walter Winchell's national radio broadcast called the vaccine a mortal failure and warned that thousands of little white coffins were being readied to receive the resulting fatalities.
Slices of parallel lives punctuate the tale nicely, from Franklin Roosevelt, the future president stricken by the disease at age 39, after which he crusades for the funding and research to battle it, to accounts from Kluger's still-living sources. John Troan, a science reporter for the Pittsburgh Press, carefully cultivated his relationship with Salk and was rewarded with several inside stories and scoops.
Several interviewees told Kluger, a senior writer at Time magazine and coauthor with astronaut James Lovell of Lost Moon (the inspiration for the Tom Hanks movie "Apollo 13"), what it was like to be crippled as children and then participate in the first field tests.
Splendid Solution is not a heart-pounding page turner. In tone and style, it's a rather old-fashioned historical tale. But in its quiet manner, it's a terrific account, and well-told.