Armstrong – Table of Contents

the term for these strains he had used originally, “spontaneous mouse encephalomyelitis.”
There were other mouse viruses including the Columbia SK, MM virus, and EMC or
“encephalomyocarditis” virus, all immunolgically similar to each other but which did not
fulfill the criteria for poliomyelitis viruses (32).
By the late 1940s (33), there were hundreds of strains exhibiting the above criteria
for poliomyelitis viruses that had been isolated in the United States. In view of the recent
adaptation of the growth of poliovirus in non-neural tissue culture media by Enders group
and the potential for vaccine development, it became important to determine precisely
how many immunologic types of polioviruses existed among the many isolated strains.
On July 10, 1948, the National Foundation Typing Committee was organized (33). Its
members included Drs. Charles Armstrong, David Bodian, Thomas Francis, Jr., Louis
Gebhardt, John Kessel, Charles F. Pait, Albert Sabin, Jonas Salk, and Herbert Wenner.
The Committee as a whole had the overall responsibility of administering the program
and the actual physical implementation of the typing program. The latter was funded
through National Foundation grants of $1.25 million dollars given to Drs. Gebhardt,
Kessel, Salk and Wenner who undertook the actual labor of typing the strains in their
own laboratories. This proved to be a monumental task considering the number of
isolations involved and the tension working with large numbers of irascible,
uncooperative monkeys who were indispensable for this type of operation. The workers
finally confirmed what had been shown previously experimentally on a smaller scale
(34), namely, that there were three distinct immunologic types of poliomyelitis virus.
This fact helped ease the selection of potential components for use in a vaccine against
poliomyelitis.