Armstrong – Table of Contents

non-neural tissue in tissue culture. After coaxing the Lansing strain to grow in this
medium, they were able also to adapt monkey brain and spinal cord tissue infected with
polioviruses types I and III to grow in non-neural cell tissue culture. They received the
Nobel Prize for this in 1954. Their accomplishment enhanced the possibility of the
eventual development of an effective vaccine against poliomyelitis.
Dr. Armstrong’s reflections on poliomyelitis in his oral history interview (18)
were a bit hazy after many years, but his musings are worth a look: “Yes, I did quite a bit
on polio. When I was doing epidemiology. When a plague or epidemic started in, it
caused a furor, a great excitement and fear among people. They would call for help, but
you couldn’t do much for them except isolation, and that wasn’t effective. There wasn’t
often when there were two cases in the family anyway. You tried to make provision for
the sick. One of the first things they would suggest was building an emergency hospital.
Everyone would help, and, in a couple of days, you would have a hospital that would
serve the purpose, and this was better than nothing. What seemed to me what was needed
was a better experimental animal. We had monkeys, but they were expensive, and
expensive to feed and keep. They were unsanitary, and they had other diseases. An effort
was made by many people to inoculate other animals, but without success.
“Dr. Max Pete [Peet] of Michigan, saw a boy who had polio and died. He sent in the
brain to me and part to Dr. Sabin in Cincinnati. I succeeded in getting a virus out of the
brain sent to me and out of the piece sent to Sabin; he failed. The virus I got, I decided to
put into other animals. I had a couple of rats, pack rats and guinea pigs, all of which I
inoculated. The pack rat [?] and the cotton rat both came down with something. I took the
brains and preserved them and put them in glycerin and refrigerated them. It was two