No More Triumphs?

In the decade since Virologist Jonas Salk perfected his anti-polio vaccine, the disease has been all but wiped out in the U.S. Reported cases of paralytic polio have dramatically declined, from 18,000 cases in 1954 to a mere 94 last year; the chance of getting polio today is less than the risk of diphtheria, malaria or typhoid fever. Last week, on the tenth anniversary of the approval of the Salk vaccine for general use, congressional leaders presented Dr. Salk with a joint resolution of the Senate and House expressing the nation's gratitude. The U.S. Public Health Service's Surgeon General, Dr. Luther Terry, called the virtual stamping-out of polio by the Salk vaccine and the live-virus polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin and approved in 1961, "a historical triumph of preventive medicine--unparalleled in history."

The triumph, however, is not likely to be duplicated in the control of cancer, heart disease and mental illness, Dr. Salk told the National Press Club in Washington. Those problems, he said, arise largely from complex internal causes rather than from a relatively simple external cause such as the virus of polio. But it is just such problems, "tied to evolution, aging and the molecular mechanisms of the cell," that Dr. Salk and his associates are now at tacking at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.

With the help of medicine, the human organism has adapted to a continually changing environment, "but now," added Dr. Salk, "man is bringing vast and rapid changes within his environment, and is producing an effect in which it is man, not nature, who exerts a dominant influence on the future course of his evolution." From fallout to new and drug-resistant strains of bacteria, not all that influence is beneficial. Medicine of the future will require "a basic science that will suggest ways to deal much more with man as a whole in his social situation."

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