Monkey-&-Man Serum

Sick monkeys squatted in their cages at the Harvard Medical School laboratories last week and languidly, fruitlessly scratched at their flealess bodies. By & by a man, monstrously big to them and brightly white in his laboratory gown, loomed before their cages. They stared at him, unblinking. He reached into a cage; a monkey side-hopped away; but the man caught him. He tried to bite the huge, imprisoning hand; the man fubbed his face away. Then there was the prick of a hollow needle through the monkey's skin; the monkey squeaked and hissed, his mouth wide open; blood ran out through the needle into a container the big human held.

When only a little blood, a harmless loss to the monkey, had flowed out, the man withdrew his needle, went to another monkey, and so to the rest; then away. The monkeys crouched in their cages, amazed, confused, ignorant that they suffered from infantile paralysis, ignorant that Dr. William Lloyd Aycock and his colleagues of the Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission had just recently learned how to mix monkey serum with human serum in order to cure infantile paralysis.

Infantile paralysis, so far as is known, occurs only in man and he is the sole source of infection. People catch it by breathing air infected by diseased people. Monkeys may be infected in the laboratory. That fact has been valuable in studying the disease (no one yet knows what germ' causes it) and in getting a new source of serum.

The disease usually starts with malaise, headache, chills, sore muscles. But many other diseases show the same symptoms (influenza, for example). After the acute stage a paralysis usually develops, most often in the legs. That is the first definite and sure sign of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis). In epidemics, such the one that terrorized New York City in 1916, 30 out of 100 infected children may die.* Ordinarily the death rate is four out of 100. Paralysis has until recently persisted in most cases. Nerves which controlled body movements had been rotted away. Sometimes it was (and is) possible to re-educate the paralyzed muscles by long, tedious and intelligent exercise.

Bacteriologists recently discovered that blood serum taken from a person convalescing from infantile paralysis can, if injected soon enough, prevent or at least minimize the paralysis. Convalescent serum, however, is scarce. The Harvard Infantile Paralysis Commission, which is doing the most extensive work on the subject in this country, has been obliged to ask cripples for ounces of their blood. The serum derived therefrom was sufficient for doles to only the most promising cases. The new monkey-&-man serum, of course, amplifies the supply.

*98% of infantile paralysis cases occur in children under 15.