Dr. Hilary Koprowski (born 1916)
Born 5 December 1916 in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire [HK006N][GDrive]
Died 11 April 2013 (aged 96), in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, U.S. [HK006N][GDrive]
ASSOCIATIONS
Dr. Alice E. Moore (born 1908) ( Moore helped provide mice and virus for Koprowski's 1952 "LATENT OR DORMANT VIRAL INFECTIONS" / NOTE Page 971 Footnote, and the credit to Dr. Alice E. Moore (born 1908) : ( PDF : [HP005Y][GDrive] / For this page, see [HP0061][GDrive] ) : "The author expresses his grateful appreciation to Dr. Alice E. Moore, of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, for the mice-bearing tumors; and to Dr. Stanley Stellar, of the Department of Neurosurgery, New York School of Medicine, for the human tumors." )
Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906) ( [Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906)]'s early work with attenuated-live-virus polio vaccine was developed from attenuated polio virus that Sabin had received from Dr. Hilary Koprowski. Source : [HK006N][GDrive] )
Dr. Stanley Alan Plotkin (born 1932) ( "Koprowski (along with [Dr. Stanley Alan Plotkin (born 1932)] and Tadeusz Wiktor) did significant work on an improved vaccine against rabies.[11] He developed the HDCV rabies vaccine in the 1960s at the Wistar Institute. It was licensed for use in the United States in 1980." ... [HK006N][GDrive] )
Dr. Paul Allan Offit (born 1951) ( " [... Dr. Paul Allan Offit (born 1951)], the chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who worked under Dr. Koprowski at Wistar in the 1980s. " ... NYTimes April 20, 2013 obituary for Dr. Koprowski at [HN01L3][GDrive] )
Dr. David B. Weiner (born 1955) ( At the Wistar Institute, Dr. Hilary Koprowski (born 1916) (long-time president of the Wistar) was the mentor of Dr. David B. Weiner (born 1955) (who became an executive vice president of the Wistar) ... see 2001 book "Big Shot, AIDS Vaccine" by Patricia Thomas )
{...]
Centocor Biotech Inc. ( Koprowski was a co-founder )
( ... )
Nationality Polish
Citizenship Poland, United States
Known for Polio vaccine
Spouse(s) : Irena Koprowska (m. 1938)
Children: 2
Awards : Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal(2007)
Scientific career Fields : Virology
Hilary Koprowski (5 December 1916 – 11 April 2013) was a Polishvirologist and immunologist active in the United States who demonstrated the world's first effective live polio vaccine. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals.
Koprowski received many academic honors and national decorations, including the Belgian Order of the Lion, the French Order of Merit and Legion of Honour, Finland's Order of the Lion, and Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Koprowski was the target of accusations in the press related to the "oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis", which posited that the AIDS pandemic originated from live polio vaccines such as Koprowski's. This allegation has long been contested by claims that the HIV-1 virus was introduced to humans before his polio-vaccine trials were conducted in Africa.[1] The case was settled out of court with a formal apology from Rolling Stonemagazine.[2]
Life
Hilary Koprowski was born in Warsaw to an educated, assimilated Jewish family.[3][4] His parents met in 1906 when Paweł Koprowski (1882–1957) was serving in the Imperial Russian Army, and moved to Warsaw soon after their marriage in 1912.[5] His mother Sonia (née Berland; 1883–1967), was a dentist from Berdichev.[6][7] Hilary Koprowski attended Warsaw's Mikołaj Rej Secondary School, and from age twelve he took piano lessons at the Warsaw Conservatory. He received a medical degree from Warsaw University in 1939. He also received music degrees from the Warsaw Conservatory and, in 1940, from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He adopted scientific research as his life's work, but never gave up music and composed several musical works. In July 1938, while in medical school, Koprowski married Irena Grasberg.[8]
In 1939, after Germany's invasion of Poland, Koprowski and his wife, likewise a physician, fled the country, using Koprowski family business connections in Manchester, England. Hilary went to Rome, where he spent a year studying piano at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory; while Irena went to France, where she gave birth to their first child, Claude Koprowski, and worked as an attending physician at a psychiatric hospital.[9]
As the invasion of France loomed in 1940, Irena and the infant escaped from France via Spain and Portugal —where the Koprowski family reunited — to Brazil, where Koprowski worked in Rio de Janeiro for the Rockefeller Foundation. His field of research for several years was finding a live-virus vaccine against yellow fever. After World War II the Koprowskis settled in Pearl River, New York, where Hilary was hired as a researcher for Lederle Laboratories, the pharmaceutical division of American Cyanamid. Here he began his polio experiments, which ultimately led to the creation of the first oral polio vaccine. Koprowski served as director of the Wistar Institute, 1957–91, during which period Wistar achieved international recognition for its vaccine research and became a National Cancer Institute Cancer Center.[citation needed]
Koprowski died on April 11, 2013, aged 96,[10][11] in Wynnewood, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of pneumonia.[12] He and his wife are buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Southlawn Section, Lot 782, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Hilary Koprowski and his late wife are survived by two sons, Claude (born in Paris, 1940) and Christopher (born 1951). Claude Koprowski is a retired physician. Christopher Koprowski is a physician certified in two specialties, neurology and radio-oncology; he is the former chair of the department of radiation oncology at Christiana Hospital in Delaware.[13]
Polio vaccine
While at Lederle Laboratories,[10] Koprowski created the world's first polio vaccine, based on an orally administered attenuated polio virus. In researching a potential polio vaccine, he had focused on live viruses that were attenuated (rendered non-virulent) rather than on killed viruses (the latter became the basis for the injected vaccine subsequently developed by Jonas Salk).
Koprowski viewed the live vaccine as more powerful, since it entered the intestinal tract directly and could provide lifelong immunity, whereas the Salk vaccine required booster shots. Also, administering a vaccine by mouth is easy, whereas an injection requires medical facilities and is more expensive.[citation needed]
Koprowski developed his polio vaccine by attenuating the virus in brain cells of a cotton rat, Sigmodon hispidus, a New World species that is susceptible to polio.[10] He administered the vaccine to himself in January 1948 and, on 27 February 1950, to 20 children at Letchworth Village, a home for disabled persons in Rockland County, New York. Seventeen of the 20 children developed antibodies to polio virus — the other three apparently already had antibodies — and none of the children developed complications. Within 10 years, the vaccine was being used on four continents.
[Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906)]'s early work with attenuated-live-virus polio vaccine was developed from attenuated polio virus that Sabin had received from Koprowski.
Rabies Vaccine
In addition to his work on the polio vaccine, Koprowski (along with [Dr. Stanley Alan Plotkin (born 1932)] and Tadeusz Wiktor) did significant work on an improved vaccine against rabies.[11] He developed the HDCV rabies vaccine in the 1960s at the Wistar Institute. It was licensed for use in the United States in 1980.[14]
Affiliations
Koprowski was president of Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories, Inc, and head of the Center for Neurovirology at Thomas Jefferson University. In 2006 he was awarded a record 50th grant from the National Institutes of Health. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals. He served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.
Honors/Legacy
Koprowski received many honorary degrees, academic honors, and national decorations, including the Order of the Lionfrom the King of Belgium, the French Order of Merit for Research and Invention, a Fulbright Scholarship, and appointment as Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. In 1989 he received the San Marino Award for Medicine and the Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Koprowski received numerous honors in Philadelphia, including the Philadelphia Cancer Research Award, the John Scott Award and, in May 1990, the most prestigious honor of his home city, the Philadelphia Award. He was a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which in 1959 presented him with its Alvarenga Prize.
Koprowski was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.[15] He held foreign membership in the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.
On June 3, 1983, Koprowski received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine at Uppsala University, Sweden.[16]
On 22 March 1995, Koprowski was made a Commander of Finland's Order of the Lion by Finland's president. On 13 March 1997 he received the Legion d'Honneur from the French government. On 29 September 1998 he was presented by Poland's president with the Grand Cross of Poland's Order of Merit.
On 25 February 2000 Koprowski was honored with a reception at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first administration of his oral polio vaccine. At the reception, he received commendations from the United States Senate, the Pennsylvania Senate, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge.
On 13 September 2004, Koprowski was presented with the Pioneer in NeuroVirology Award by the International Society for NeuroVirology at the 6th International Symposium on NeuroVirology held in Sardinia. On 1 May 2007, Koprowski was awarded the Albert Sabin Gold Medal by the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.[17]
In 2014 Drexel University established the Hilary Koprowski Prize in Neurovirology in honor of Dr. Koprowski's contributions to the field of neurovirology. The prize is awarded annually in conjunction with the International Symposium on Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease, which is sponsored by the Institute for Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease (IMMID) within the Drexel University College of Medicine. During the Symposium, the prize recipient is asked to deliver an honorary lecture.
AIDS accusation
Main article: Oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis
British journalist Edward Hooper publicized a hypothesis that Koprowski's research into a polio vaccine in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s might have caused AIDS.
The OPV AIDS hypothesis has, however, been rejected within much of the medical community and is contradicted by at least one article in the journal Nature, which claims the HIV-1 group M virus originated in Africa 30 years before the OPV trials were conducted.[1] However, the field work within the study was limited to just 34 samples all taken within the immediate vicinity of Kisangani. Despite this the journal Science refuted Hooper's claims, writing: "[I]t can be stated with almost complete certainty that the large polio vaccine trial... was not the origin of AIDS."[18]
Koprowski rejected the claim, based on his own analysis. In a separate court case, he won a regretful clarification,[19] and a symbolic award of $1 in damages,[20] in a defamation suit against Rolling Stone, which had published an article repeating similar unproven allegations.[21] A concurrent defamation lawsuit that Koprowski brought against the Associated Press was settled several years later; the settlement's terms were not publicly disclosed.[20]
Koprowski's original reports from 1960 to 1961 detailing part of his vaccination campaign in the Belgian Congo are available online from the World Health Organization.[22][23][24]
See also
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[Sources]
- Worobey M, Santiago ML, Keele BF, Ndjango JB, Joy JB, Labama BL, Dhed'A BD, Rambaut A, Sharp PM, Shaw GM, Hahn BH (2004). "Origin of AIDS: contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted" (PDF file, direct download 203 KB). Nature. 428 (6985): 820. doi:10.1038/428820a. PMID 15103367. S2CID 4418410. Note 1,13: Korber, B.et al. Science 288, 1789–1796 (2000)
- Martin B (August 2003). "Investigating the origin of AIDS: some ethical dimensions". J Med Ethics. 29 (4): 253–256. doi:10.1136/jme.29.4.253. PMC 1733782. PMID 12930866.
- Profile, Whatisbiotechnology.org; accessed 21 April 2015.
- Dr Hilary Koprowski: Virologist who developed the first oral vaccine against polio, independent.co.uk; accessed 21 April 2015.
- The Pawel Koprowski Memorial Vacation Award was founded by Hilary Koprowski in 1958 in honor of his father.
- The Koprowski and Berland Genealogy, ancestry.com; accessed 21 April 2015.
- Mémoires of Judith Yazvina (2004)
- Biography, U.S. National Library of Medicine website; accessed 21 April 2015.
- Koprowska, Irena (1997). A Woman Wanders Through Life and Science. State University of New York Press. ISBN 9780791431771.
- Hilary Koprowski, Who Developed First Live-Virus Polio Vaccine, Dies at 96 - The New York Times, April 20, 2013.
- Plotkin, S.A., "In Memoriam: Hilary Koprowski, 1916–2013", J. Virol., August 2013 vol. 87 no. 15, pp. 8270-8271. doi: 10.1128/JVI.01449-13. Accessed 24 May 2017.
- Hilary Koprowski, polio vaccine pioneer, dead at 96, philly.com, April 13, 2013.
- http://www.christianacare.org/body.cfm?id=961
- "Rabies Vaccine 2", History of Vaccines, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (2017). Accessed 24 May 2017.
- ^ Directory [of] PIASA Members, p. 25.
- ^ http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/traditions/prizes/honorary-doctorates/
- ^ Award Ceremony and speeches Archived 2008-10-02 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Panel nixes Congo trials as AIDS source". Science. 258 (5083): 738–39. 1992. doi:10.1126/science.258.5083.738-d. PMID 1439779.
- ^ "Origin of AIDS" update: Clarification Archived 2008-08-05 at the Wayback Machine, uow.edu.au, 9 December 1993, p. 39
- Brian Martin (2001) "The Politics of a Scientific Meeting: the Origin-of-AIDS Debate at the Royal Society" in Politics & the Life Sciences, pp. 119-130 online Archived 2008-08-02 at the Wayback Machine
- Hilary Koprowski (1992). "AIDS and the polio vaccine". Science. 257 (5073): 1024, 1026–27. doi:10.1126/science.257.5073.1024. PMID 1509249. Archived from the original on 2008-08-21. Retrieved 2006-06-09.
- LeBrun A, Cerf J, Gelfand HM, Courtois G, Plotkin SA, Koprowski H (1960) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelities virus in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo 1. Description of the city, its history of poliomyelitis, and the plan of the vaccination campaign", Bull World Health Organ. 22:203-13 online Archived 2008-10-31 at the Wayback Machine
- Plotkin SA, LeBrun A, Koprowski H (1960) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelitis virus in Leopoldville. Belgian Congo 2. Studies of the safety and efficacy of vaccination", Bull World Health Organ 22:215-34 onlineArchived 2012-02-06 at the Wayback Machine
- Plotkin SA, LeBrun A, Courtois G, Koprowski H (1961) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelitis virus in Leopoldville, Congo 3. Safety and efficacy during the first 21 months of study" Bull World Health Organ 24:785-92 onlineArchived 2012-02-06 at the Wayback Machine
References
- Roger Vaughan, Listen to the Music: The Life of Hilary Koprowski, Berlin, Springer, 2000; ISBN 0-387-98849-1
- David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story, Oxford University Press, 2005; ISBN 0-19-515294-8
- 2007 Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal awarded to Hilary Koprowski (booklet/PDF file); accessed 21 April 2015.
- Directory [of] PIASA Members, 1999, New York City, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, 1999.
External links
- Hilary Koprowski (2012), Polio Vaccine. Official site. Internet Archive.
- Stacey Burling (April 14, 2013), "Hilary Koprowski, polio vaccine pioneer, dead at 96". Philly.com, Internet Archive.
2013 (April 20, 2021): NYTimes : "Hilary Koprowski, Who Developed First Live-Virus Polio Vaccine, Dies at 96"
By Margalit Fox , April 20, 2013 / Source : [HN01L3][GDrive]
It was a brew to rival any in “Macbeth.” The main ingredients were rat brain and a fearsome, carefully cultivated virus.
In his laboratory in Pearl River, N.Y., 20 miles north of Manhattan, Dr. Hilary Koprowski macerated the ingredients in an ordinary kitchen blender one January day in 1948. He poured the result — thick, cold, gray and greasy — into a beaker, lifted it to his lips and drank. It tasted, he later said, like cod liver oil.
With that sip, Dr. Koprowski, a virologist who died on April 11 at 96, inoculated himself against polio, years before the vaccines of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
Dr. Koprowski was one of the world’s foremost biomedical researchers, helping usher in a spate of innovations, including a safer, less painful and more effective rabies vaccine that remains widely used.
But his most noteworthy innovation — developing the first viable vaccine against polio and testing it successfully on humans — is far less well known. It has long been eclipsed in public memory by the triumphs of Salk, whose injectable vaccine was introduced in 1955, and Sabin, whose oral vaccine was introduced in stages in the early 1960s.
“Koprowski’s was the first serious scientific attempt at a live-virus polio vaccine,” said the historian David M. Oshinsky, whose 2005 book, “Polio: An American Story,” chronicles the race to pre-empt the disease. “Jonas Salk is a god in America, Albert Sabin’s got a ton of publicity, and Hilary Koprowski, who really should be part of that trinity, is the forgotten man.”
From the beginning, a live-virus vaccine like Dr. Koprowski’s was the most coveted weapon in the war on polio. Such vaccines can be administered orally and are far cheaper than injections. And because they involve live viruses, which can spread within a community, they can also confer immunity on others. (The Salk vaccine, made from killed viruses, cannot.)
But there was a grave catch: for a live polio vaccine to be safe, the viruses would have to be sufficiently weakened — attenuated, in medical parlance — so they would produce antibodies without inducing polio’s neurological effects.
On the evidence, the Koprowski vaccine did precisely this. But though it was given to patients overseas with good results, it was never approved for use in the United States.
Dr. Koprowski was the last of the three great virologists who stalked polio at midcentury; Sabin died in 1993, Salk in 1995. His death raises a large retrospective question: Why, in an era when a polio vaccine was the most urgently sought grail in American public health, did his go unused?
The answer, gleaned from period news accounts, histories of the war on polio and interviews with Dr. Koprowski’s associates, illuminates the delicate balance of risk and reward — and the uneasy confluence of science, politics and personality — that can inform the development of a drug.
Dr. Koprowski, who spent more than 30 years as the director of the Wistar Institute, a biomedical research center in Philadelphia, was widely described as a titanic, sometimes polarizing figure: a refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland, he was a trained concert pianist, a fluent speaker of seven languages, a connoisseur of food and wine, and a collector of old master paintings.
“He was the single most forceful, dominant, charismatic person I have ever met in my life,” said [Dr. Paul Allan Offit (born 1951)], the chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who worked under Dr. Koprowski at Wistar in the 1980s.
That outsize personality, combined with Dr. Koprowski’s outsider status — he spent part of his career in industry at a time when academia had far more prestige — may have played a role in the fate of his vaccine, his biographer, Roger Vaughan, and Professor Oshinsky said in interviews.
Others, including Dr. Offit, say the outcome was based on science alone. But all agree that Dr. Koprowski, by demonstrating that a live-virus polio vaccine could be safe and effective, paved the way for the [Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906)] vaccine.
And it was [Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906)]'s vaccine, even more than Salk’s, that brought about the near-eradication of polio worldwide.
“Sometimes,” Dr. Koprowski says tellingly in Mr. Vaughan’s biography, “Listen to the Music: The Life of Hilary Koprowski” (2000), “I introduce myself as the developer of the Sabin poliomyelitis vaccine.”
Hilary Koprowski was born in Warsaw on Dec. 5, 1916. He attended the Warsaw Conservatory and Warsaw University simultaneously, earning a medical degree from the university in 1939.
Late that year, after the German invasion of Poland, Dr. Koprowski, who was partly of Jewish extraction, left the country with his family. He studied music in Rome before moving to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Yellow Fever Research Service.
In 1944, Dr. Koprowski arrived in the United States and joined Lederle Laboratories, a pharmaceutical concern in Pearl River. It was there, in the late 1940s, that he began his work on polio.
By the mid-20th century, the United States was reporting 20,000 to 60,000 new cases of polio a year, most affecting children. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had contracted polio as an adult, established what became the March of Dimes, which would finance the Salk and [Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin (born 1906)] vaccines.
“What you have to understand about Koprowski was that he was the leading polio researcher from private industry,” Professor Oshinsky said. “Had he come out of the university and had he been funded by the March of Dimes, I think he would have been a favorite of the virology community.”
But he seemed, at least at times, to roil that community, already skittish about polio.
In the 1930s, researchers had tested two vaccines made from killed polio viruses, in principle safer than live ones. But as it transpired, the viruses had not been killed entirely, and the vaccines paralyzed some children.
As a result, the idea of testing a polio vaccine — much less a live one — on humans was almost beyond contemplation by midcentury.
The first successful live-virus vaccine of any kind was for yellow fever, developed in the late 1930s by the virologist Max Theiler; for his work, he received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The method Theiler devised for attenuating the virus involved injecting it into a series of nonhuman embryo cells, including those of mice and chickens. In the late ’40s, Dr. Koprowski wondered whether a similar method could be used to attenuate polio.
Because the cotton rat, a genus found in the Americas, was susceptible to polio, Dr. Koprowski injected the virus into cotton rat brains.
“The thinking is this,” [Dr. Paul Allan Offit (born 1951)] explained: “As the virus gets better and better at growing in, in this case, a rodent, it would become less and less capable of growing or reproducing itself in people.”
The result was the grim gray cocktail Dr. Koprowski drank in the lab that day in 1948. He suffered no ill effects.
Two years later, Dr. Koprowski received a call from Letchworth Village, a home for mentally disabled children in Rockland County, N.Y. Fearing an outbreak of polio, the home asked him to vaccinate its children.
In February 1950, in the first human trial of a live polio vaccine, Dr. Koprowski vaccinated 20 children there. At the time, approval from the federal government was required to market drugs but not to test them.
Seventeen of the children developed antibodies against polio. (The other three turned out to have the antibodies already.) None of the children experienced complications.
Describing his trial at a scientific meeting the next year, Dr. Koprowski met with astonished displeasure. In an exchange recounted in Professor Oshinsky’s book, Sabin, who was present, accosted him, saying: “Why did you do it? Why? Why?”
Sabin’s objection was not to Dr. Koprowski’s testing the vaccine on cognitively disabled children — that was common practice then. It was to his having tested a live polio vaccine on any human being at all.
“Koprowski replied that someone had to take the next step,” Professor Oshinsky wrote, “so it might as well be him.”
In 1958, Dr. Koprowski administered his vaccine to nearly a quarter million patients in the Belgian Congo. “It appears to have been completely safe, almost 100 percent effective,” Time magazine reported.
(His work in the Congo came to renewed attention in the 1990s after two publications — Rolling Stone magazine and “The River,” a book by the British writer Edward Hooper — asserted that Dr. Koprowski had unwittingly spread H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, by injecting patients there with contaminated polio vaccines. The assertions have since been discredited.)
In 1960, after several live attenuated polio vaccines, including Sabin’s and Dr. Koprowski’s, had been studied, the United States surgeon general, Leroy E. Burney, announced the approval of Sabin’s. Tests on monkeys had shown it to be somewhat more attenuated, and therefore somewhat safer, than Dr. Koprowski’s.
“He believed they exaggerated the deficiencies and the dangers of his vaccine,” Professor Oshinsky said of Dr. Koprowski. “Hilary Koprowski’s rebuttal to Sabin would have been, ‘If you had started your vaccine when I started, in the late 1940s, there would be tens of thousands of kids who are not paralyzed now.’ ”
At Wistar, which he led from 1957 to 1991, Dr. Koprowski is credited with transforming the place from a moribund Victorian institution into a first-class research facility. Several important vaccines were created there under his stewardship, including one for rubella, developed in the 1960s by Stanley Plotkin.
Besides his own work on the improved rabies vaccine, which he helped develop in the ’60s, Dr. Koprowski was known for significant early work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies.
Occurring naturally in the body, these antibodies help the immune system attack particular kinds of cells. Made in quantity in the laboratory, they can be used to combat a range of infectious diseases, as well as certain cancers.
Dr. Koprowski, who held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania, with which Wistar is associated, was later affiliated with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
Dr. Koprowski’s wife, the former Irena Grasberg, whom he married in 1938, died last year. He is survived by two sons, both of whom received his vaccine as children without complications — Christopher, who confirmed his father’s death, at his home in Wynnewood, Pa., and Claude — and by five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Asked publicly about the lack of recognition for his polio vaccine, Dr. Koprowski was courtly, saying the corresponding lack of hoopla freed him to focus on pure research.
His private feelings differed.
“I think that there was a great deal of hurt and jealousy on his part that he never got credit for what he discovered, and for the path that he blazed for others to follow,” Professor Oshinsky said. “He pretty much told me that when I interviewed him.”
Dr. Koprowski received many laurels, including the French Legion of Honor. In 2007, his work was recognized with a signal honor, presented annually for distinguished contributions to vaccinology.
The award is known as the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal.
1952... Testing polio vaccine on institutionalized children ?
Live youtube link > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92seQHDohho
Institutionalized Children - The Medical Community's Guinea Pigs of Choice during the 20th Century / Oct 30, 2013
Rock Ethics Institute : This is part of the Rock Ethics Institute's Research Ethics Lecture Series.
Saved MP4 : [HV00GX][GDrive] / Image : [HV00GY][GDrive]
Though often cited as our most precious resource and dearest commodity, children -- particularly those institutionalized in orphanages, mental asylums, and warehouses for the "feebleminded" -- were often sought out by physicians and medical researchers as test subjects for experimentation. Even a cursory examination of 20th century medical research will illuminate numerous examples of children -- some only days old -- being incorporated in a wide range of medical research. Many prominent investigators in search of practical treatments and vaccines, exploring the impact of radiation and psychotropic drugs, or new surgical procedures like lobotomy, routinely found their way to poorly funded and under-staffed state institutions housing the nation's most vulnerable citizens.
EVIDENCE TIMELINE
1947 (Oct 17)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/97684340/?terms=%22Hilary%20Koprowski%22&match=1
1947-10-17-detroit-free-press-pg-32-clip-blood-polio.jpg
1949 (Nov 21)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/489757419/?terms=%22Hilary%20Koprowski%22&match=1
1950 (April 29)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/9954042/?terms=%22Hilary%20Koprowski%22&match=1
1950-04-29-the-terre-haute-star-pg-02.jpg
1950-04-29-the-terre-haute-star-pg-02-clip-rabies-vax.jpg
1950 (Aug 27)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/618282599/?terms=%22Hilary%20Koprowski%22&match=1
1950-08-12-the-charlotte-observer-pg-7-a-clip-vaccines.jpg
1952 Research - "LATENT OR DORMANT VIRAL INFECTIONS. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 54(6), 963–976."
Koprowski, H. (1952). LATENT OR DORMANT VIRAL INFECTIONS. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 54(6), 963–976. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1952.tb39972.x / PDF : [HP005Y][GDrive]
NOTE Page 971 Footnote, and the credit to Dr. Alice E. Moore (born 1908) : ( PDF : [HP005Y][GDrive] / For this page, see [HP0061][GDrive] ) : "The author expresses his grateful appreciation to Dr. Alice E. Moore, of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, for the mice-bearing tumors; and to Dr. Stanley Stellar, of the Department of Neurosurgery, New York School of Medicine, for the human tumors."
The purpose of this paper is to review some of our knowledge concerning latent virus infections, in the hope that such a survey of the distribution, variety and behavior of these infections may facilitate the study of the neoplastic processes in man and in domestic and laboratory animals. I shall purposely avoid giving a definition of latency, since, if a broad, ecological view of the phenomenon of survival of parasites in nature is taken, it becomes clear that the stabilization of the host-parasite relationship cannot be based only upon the multiplication of virus at the expense of destroyed cells. It is much more probable that, in many instances, a latent virus persists in its host-cell as an innocuous symbiont, with a capacity to shed virulent variants only in rare cases.' Thus, if the broader view is adopted, a paper on latency of viruses should really encompass all known viral infections of plants, animals and insects. This would obviously be much beyond the scope of this presentation. Therefore, following a brief discussion of the methods of detection of dormant viral infection, examples of only a few such infections will be described in detail and the others mentioned briefly.
Detection of Latent Infection : An inapparent infection may become apparent and cause signs of disease in its host whenever the delicate equilibrium between parasite and host is upset. This may be caused by a change in environmental conditions, by a disturbance of the physiologic equilibrium of the host, or by any other factor or factors of a nature as yet undetermined.
More commonly, a dormant virus infection may be detected by a careful examination of either animal or plant tissues, the cells of which are suspected to contain these viruses. If the latter is visible and morphologically identifiable, then such methods as electron microscopy can be used successfully for that purpose. In other instances, transplantation of the material into other animal or plant species, with resulting signs of infection, may constitute proof of latency. The demonstration of a specific antigen in the suspected tissue by serological tests may sometimes be the means of detecting an inapparent viral infection.
Finally, if the latent virus is able to evoke an immune reaction in its host, detection of specific antibodies and/or resistance to reinfection with the homologous agent may be considered as an indication of persistence of the virus in inapparent form in the host.
Obviously, these methods and techniques are neither exact nor exhaustive but they cannot be improved until our knowledge of the intricate mechanism of infection of living cells with viruses becomes more comprehensive. There seems to be little doubt, however, that many instances of latent infection escape notice because of the inadequacy of existing methods of detection. These reservations should be borne in mind during the ensuing discussion. [...]
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1953 (April 02)
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1953 (Oct 25) salk vs koprowski
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