Dr. Julius Youngner



Dr. Julius Youngner

TORGHELE: It is May 25, 2016, and I am at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. And I'm speaking with Dr. Julius Youngner, who is in Pittsburgh, so we are on the phone in the recording studio. My name is Karen Torghele, and I'll be talking with Dr. Youngner for the Global Health Chronicles Polio Oral History Project. We're honored to have Dr. Youngner with us. He is one of the essential contributors, and the only surviving member, of the team that developed the first polio vaccine.

Julius Youngner, a microbiologist, has been working in some capacity at the University of Pittsburgh since 1949. Is that right, Dr. Youngner?

YOUNGNER: That's right.

TORGHELE: And he is still a valued member of the virology community. Well, I want to say welcome to Dr. Youngner, and thank you so much for being with us today.

YOUNGNER: I'm happy to be here.

TORGHELE: To start, would you like to tell us a little bit about your background? Where you grew up, where you went to school, and what your family 00:01:00was like, those are all interesting ways to start.

YOUNGNER: Well, I was born in 1920 in the Lower East Side of New York, City at St. Mark's Hospital. At the age of two and a half, my parents were divorced, and I was raised mainly by my grandmother while my mother was the earner for the family. We then moved to Upper Manhattan, and, a typical New Yorker, it was easier to move than to paint. And so we did move to the Bronx, and then to Queens, and finally ended up at 86th Street and West End Avenue, on the sixteenth floor, where I spent my teenage years. I graduated from high school in 00:02:001936 and then went to the New York University. They had a campus at that time at University Heights Campus, which was a separate campus from the Manhattan at Washington Square. It was mainly engineering and science, and I graduated from there in 1939.

TORGHELE: What did you study?

YOUNGNER: I majored in English and minored in biology. After I graduated from New York University in 1939, I then went to the University of Michigan. Now, the 00:03:00reason I went into what was then called bacteriology, I think it was because I got some advice from a nephew of my family physician who had gone to the University of Michigan and been associated with the bacteriology department there in the medical school. But I think I was attracted to this field because as a child, I had suffered from every known childhood disease that medicine was aware of. This was before the days of antibiotics, and so I say, I told somebody recently in an interview that my longevity was probably due to my immune system being boosted by all of these childhood infections.

TORGHELE: Oh, you must have a fantastic immune system.

YOUNGNER: I hope so. I hope it lasts.

TORGHELE: So you had measles, mumps, rubella.

YOUNGNER: Double pneumonia, pneumococcal pneumonia, meningitis, that's about it.

TORGHELE: That's enough.

YOUNGNER: Almost died from the pneumococcal pneumonia at the age of seven. I was really close to being dead. There was nothing then to treat it. The antibody treatment came later, and then, of course, antibiotics after that.

So anyway, that's the story of my childhood and education. After finishing my degree at the University of Michigan, my doctorate, I was drafted into the army 00:05:00by my draft board in New York City. I was ready to go into the navy as lieutenant in the navy in a malaria control unit. But my draft board in New York had precedence over everything, and so the navy said, we can't do anything about it, we've tried, but you've got to go in the army.

I went in the army as a draftee and ended up in Manhattan Project. First I was in Oakridge, Tennessee, where I was being vetted, and I was there for two weeks. And then I was transferred to a unit at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, where they were studying the toxicity of uranium salts in 00:06:00rabbits and beagle dogs, because the workers in the plants in Oakridge and elsewhere that were purifying uranium isotopes were being subjected to uranium dust. And this was a control facility where I learned a lot of pathology. It was very helpful to me in that sense.

TORGHELE: Was it a secret to you what you were doing and why you were doing it?

YOUNGNER: Well, at the beginning, I had no idea. All I was told when I was being vetted at Oakridge was that it was a weapon, that if we got it first we'd win the war, and if the Germans got it first they would win the war. That was scary enough, and also there was complete and total secrecy. We didn't know what was 00:07:00going on. I tried to get on a bus to see. These buses were going by, with destinations such as K-24 and G-11. I got on a bus and tried to get to one of these plants. As soon as I got on the bus, the bus driver said, where's your ID? And I said, I don't need one, I'm in the army. He said, you are in the army, and if you don't get off this bus I'm going to call the military police.

I never did get to see where they were working. I was in a small compound reserved for the GIs that were being vetted for security reasons, and kept very much isolated.

TORGHELE: Did you find out why you were chosen specifically to work on the project?

YOUNGNER: Yes, I did find out. There was another graduate student, at the time 00:08:00that I was at Ann Arbor, who was a biochemist named Gene Roberts, who had been hired by the Manhattan Project to work in Rochester on this project. He had heard that I was drafted as a private and thought that that was a waste, and somehow Manhattan Project had precedence over everything. I found out later that my professor, [Walter] Nungester at University of Michigan, was working at Fort Dietrich and had requested my transfer to Fort Dietrich working on biological warfare. He never heard anything, and when he tried to find out about me it was like I had disappeared into thin air. So, he couldn't even find out where I was. 00:09:00That's how secretive they were.

TORGHELE: Were you able to communicate with your family at all?

YOUNGNER: Yes. I brought my family to Rochester, and they stayed with me there until I was mustered out. I only had one child, who was two years old by the time we left Rochester. So that's the history of my military career. I had spent eight weeks in basic training because they needed soldiers very badly, infantry, very badly. At the time of the Battle of the Bulge, I was taking infantry training at Camp Barkeley, Texas. Then they needed bodies very badly, so they 00:10:00were taking men out after eight weeks of training and sending them to the Battle of the Bulge because they were so short of personnel at that time.

When everybody left, I was left standing alone. Ninety-nine men left and got into trucks and went, and I stood all alone there and was told to wait and I'd find out something about where to go. It was kind of mysterious to me. It's amazing how guilty I felt to be left behind.

TORGHELE: Did you find out what happened to your coworkers later?

YOUNGNER: They were sent overseas. I waited two days, scrounging meals from various mess halls because my unit where I was training was closed down. Finally 00:11:00somebody came in a Jeep and took me to headquarters, and then they tried to find out what I knew about what was going on in Fort Dietrich, and I didn't have the vaguest idea. I never did go to Fort Dietrich, but the major who was questioning me was certainly very curious as to why I was getting this special treatment, because everywhere I traveled I traveled with sealed orders. So I didn't know where I was going until I got on the train, and then no MPs [military police] could question me where I was going, very mysterious.

TORGHELE: That must have been quite an experience.

YOUNGNER: Yeah. Getting to Oakridge, first of all, nobody on the train ever heard of a military installation called Oakridge. I got off at Knoxville and called a telephone number that the orders told me to call. Somebody answered 00:12:00saying hello, and I said, I'm supposed to call this number, and they asked me if I was who I was, and I said yes, and he said, just wait there, I'll come and get you. I just went to sleep on my duffle bag, and a little while later somebody in civilian clothes woke me up and took me in a plain automobile out into the mountains in Tennessee, and I was in Oakridge.

TORGHELE: That involved a lot of trust on your part, it sounds like.

YOUNGNER: Well, it was scary, but I was curious. It was mysterious rather than scary, let me put it that way. I wasn't scared at any time, I was just terribly curious about what was going on.

TORGHELE: And what your life was going to be like when you got there.

YOUNGNER: Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know. After I finished my military service, I went back to the University of Michigan at the Department of Bacteriology for one year as an instructor, and then was looking around for places because that was only a temporary requirement, that they take me back for a year. Then I found out that the United States Public Health Service was opening up commissions for scientist officers. Up to that time, this was 1947, up to that time they had only commissioned physicians, dentists, veterinarians, and nurses, and those made up the officer core, but they never had scientists. 00:14:00So I heard that they were recruiting, and it was interesting to me, and so I went through all the tests for getting into the Public Health Service, physicals and other written tests and so forth, and finally got a commission and was assigned to the Cancer Institute in Bethesda.

TORGHELE: Now, had you heard of the Communicable Disease Center or Malaria Control in War Areas at that time?

YOUNGNER: I don't think I was really aware of the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] at all.

TORGHELE: It seems like that would have been a good fit for you at the time, but it was new.

YOUNGNER: It was new, and I didn't hear of it until later on when we worked on the vaccine. Then I became conscious of the CDC, but before that I had no inkling. CDC would have maybe been a better match, but I didn't have any contact 00:15:00knowledge of CDC.

TORGHELE: So you were in NIH [National Institutes of Health] at the Cancer Institute?

YOUNGNER: Well, I worked on mammary tumors in mice, but my whole desire was to work on cell culture, and I did a small project with a colleague there named Clifford Grobstein, who later became the first dean of the medical school in La Jolla [the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine]. We did a small study, and a very simple-minded study when you look back on it now. We took two different species of cells and grew them together to see whether there 00:16:00was any incompatibility in cell culture, as there was in animals.

TORGHELE: So, two different species of animal?

YOUNGNER: Yeah, like chicken and mouse.

TORGHELE: And what did you find?

YOUNGNER: This was published in Science, because it was so simple-minded that Science published it. At that time, cell culture was just getting into its own, and then I wanted to do something with cell culture and viruses because I had heard what [John Franklin] Enders, [Thomas Huckle] Weller and [Frederick Chapman] Robbins had done with polio virus and cell culture. I just wanted to do something with viruses and cell culture, so I could combine the tissue culture and cell culture system with my interest in infectious diseases.

TORGHELE: So can you remind us what Enders and Weller and Robbins--

YOUNGNER: They were the first ones to show that polio virus could grow in 00:17:00non-neural tissues, and they won the Nobel Prize later for that in 1954.

TORGHELE: And you took it from there?

YOUNGNER: Yes. I went to the scientific director of the Cancer Institute and told him what I wanted to do, and he was himself working on cell culture for another reason, and he said, there's no room. The people who were doing cell culture there were using Alexis Carrell's technique of working in a stainless-steel room that was completely steam-sterilized, and everybody wore hoods, masks and gowns. It was just impossible for that kind of work to be done at the Cancer Institute. So I said, I'd like to do it, and he said, well, 00:18:00they're building the Clinical Center and it will be through in a year or two. Why don't you go someplace where you can do what you want and then come back here, and we'll pay your salary as a commissioned officer while you're gone?

So I started to look around and let some acquaintances in Ann Arbor know what was going on. And one of them was also an acquaintance of Jonas Salk, who was at the School of Public Health, but I had never met him. We were in Ann Arbor at the same time, but the medical school and the School of Public Health might as well have been ten miles apart.

So Jonas Salk heard from our mutual acquaintance what I was looking for, and he 00:19:00wrote me a letter and told me what they were doing. They were typing polio viruses at the time. He had moved from Ann Arbor to Pittsburgh and had gotten some money from the National Foundation [for Infantile Paralysis], which is now called the March of Dimes. He'd gotten some money to be one of the three groups that were typing polio viruses to see whether there were only three types, if there were more, it would make it more difficult to develop a vaccine. All three labs agreed with the samples we had in Pittsburgh. There were twenty-four samples from different parts of the country, and when I got there, this was all being done in monkeys, which is a laborious and difficult way to do typing. What 00:20:00I started to do was work on cell culture, and pretty soon had monkey kidney cell cultures going, and started to do the typing in culture as well.

So I had this cell culture going, and by a year and a half, we were already growing polio virus and inactivating it. It's amazing. We couldn't do that today. We could do so many things then that would have been obstacles for us today. Mouth pipetting and no laminar flow hoods and no safety glasses when you 00:21:00were working.

TORGHELE: No protection.

YOUNGNER: No protection. Well, lab coats, but I never wore gloves. It's amazing that nobody got infected.

TORGHELE: That is amazing.

YOUNGNER: Nobody did. There were just five professionals and animal technicians and glassware technicians, and later the group grew when we started to scale up to almost industrial-size production, a vaccine that we could use in trials in Pittsburgh in volunteers.

TORGHELE: So when you decided to go to the Pittsburgh lab, do you remember what it was that most influenced you to go there?

YOUNGNER: Jonas Salk, and the opportunity he gave me. He said, you could work on 00:22:00any virus on cell culture, but if you could work in polio virus, I would appreciate it. And that made it possible. I had sort of a carte blanche, and he was a very persuasive and bright man, and we got along very well. I decided to go there for two years, and by the end of two years we were so far into the development of the vaccine that I got in touch with the people in Bethesda and said, I'd like to stay here. And they said, well, we can't extend your two years, but you can go into the Reserves. That's what I did. I stayed in the Reserves and kept getting promoted in the Reserves until I was 65, without doing 00:23:00anything. I kept volunteering for going abroad for various emergencies that the Public Health Service was involved in, but they never chose me to go.

TORGHELE: It sounds like it was a good choice for you.

YOUNGNER: That brings us to the time when we were developing the vaccine.

TORGHELE: Who else was at the lab at the time when you came?

YOUNGNER: There was Jim Lewis and Major [Byron] Bennett. Jim Lewis was a PhD, but Bennett didn't have a degree. He was trained in the military. He had been at Walter Reed, and he had been in North Africa and worked on typhus, and was an 00:24:00excellent, excellent technician and got to work with mice. Jim Lewis did most of the monkey work. Then there was me, and there was Jonas [Salk], and then later came Percival Bazeley, who was an Australian who had developed penicillin in Australia during the war and had gotten quite distinguished awards for his contribution to the war effort. He came because he had skill in scaling up production. So that's what we had to do to make enough virus to really do something in Pittsburgh, and then to develop a protocol that we could hand to pharmaceutical companies who would do the big, large-scale production.

TORGHELE: So he had done that with development of penicillin.

YOUNGNER: In Australia.

TORGHELE: Was he able to transfer his skills to your lab?

YOUNGNER: Yes. He was responsible for the scaling up of the production.

TORGHELE: Now, did you all socialize outside of work, or did you even have time to socialize?

YOUNGNER: Well, Jonas Salk didn't run a group that encouraged fraternization, let me put it that way. He kept us pretty well separated. He never had any group meetings. He would deal with each person individually. He never had social events at all, except my wife and I were friendly with him, and we had dinner at their house and they had dinner at our house. I don't know that he had this kind 00:26:00of relationship with any others. I'll give you an example of the attitude. One time he came to me early on and said, Juli, I'd appreciate it when there are others around that you refer to me as Dr. Salk and not call me by my first name.

TORGHELE: So, very formal?

YOUNGNER: Very formal.

TORGHELE: I see.

YOUNGNER: He wanted to maintain a distance. Anyway, Jonas Salk is a whole other story.

TORGHELE: So, you didn't have team meetings, for instance, and share what you were doing to collaborate?

YOUNGNER: No, it was all through him. Bennett would prepare samples for 00:27:00injection into monkeys, and Jim Lewis would do the monkeys, and then I would do all the development of cell culture procedures to test things. And I developed a rapid color test for testing antibody and virus, and that made things go very fast. Without that test, it would have been hard to do all the samples that were coming through. So that gives you a description of the lab. He liked to keep all the strings in his hand.

TORGHELE: In control, it sounds like.

YOUNGNER: He was a control freak.

TORGHELE: So, how long was a typical day for you?

YOUNGNER: Well, I would go in in the morning after breakfast, and I always came home and had dinner with my wife and kids, because we only lived about ten minutes from the lab. And then I would almost always go back for a while in the evening, and I always went in on weekends. It was pretty intensive, but I always had dinner with my family.

TORGHELE: Oh, that's good. I'm sure that was very important to all of you.

YOUNGNER: It was important to me, yeah.

TORGHELE: Now, there were others working on polio vaccine at the same time as your lab was. Did you ever collaborate with any of them?

YOUNGNER: No. The only person that Jonas was in touch with really was David Bodian at Johns Hopkins [Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine], and he 00:29:00got a lot of advice, both political and scientific, from David Bodian, because Jonas was involved with the immunization committee at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, who were largely influenced in their thinking by Albert Sabin, who thought that an inactivated vaccine would never work. Jonas was fighting battles all the time, and he won almost all of them for one important reason, and that is that Basil O'Connor had complete and total faith in Jonas.

Basil O'Connor was the president of the National Foundation [for Infantile Paralysis]. He had been a law partner of Franklin Roosevelt at one time, and he became president of the foundation and ran it until his death. He took Jonas 00:30:00under his wing and believed in Jonas Salk, so that's why we could go on, although there was all this opposition in the immunization committee. Jonas fought all those battles. I had nothing to do with any of that. I was the inside man. He did that very well, he was very good at that, except Albert Sabin could out-debate him any time of day or night, month, or year. Albert Sabin was a forceful personality and great debater. When they got together, Jonas always was one step behind him.

TORGHELE: Sounds like Dr. Sabin was pretty intimidating.

YOUNGNER: Yeah, he was a real curmudgeon, real curmudgeon. But the feeling 00:31:00between them was very hostile. I'll give you an example. Am I taking your time?

TORGHELE: I'm enjoying everything you're saying.

YOUNGNER: I have to give you an example, which typifies the way they felt about one another. Sometime in the eighties, 1980s, I was president of the American Society for Virology and the year I was president, it turned out that there was going to be a celebration of Albert Sabin's eightieth birthday at the NIH [National Institutes of Health], at the Fogarty Center. As president of the American Society for Virology I was invited to this affair, which consisted of a 00:32:00daylong sort of celebration, his former students and fellows giving papers.

Albert Sabin sat through everything. He was quite shaky at that time, but he sat through it all and asked his usual questions and nasty questions. And then after the session was over, we went to the Cosmos Club in Washington. And then there was a banquet, and then after the banquet we went to an auditorium where various speeches and praise of Albert Sabin were made. At one point I was on the program, and I got up and made my greetings to him and congratulations from the 00:33:00American Society for Virology and all the virologists in the United States. The last speaker, of course, was Albert Sabin, who was the speaker. He got up there and was talking about how he developed the Sabin vaccine and how he had carried out the field trials.

Albert Sabin got up to speak and he was talking about, as I said, about the 00:34:00development of the vaccine, and then he talked about the first announcement he made to the virology community about the success of his vaccine. And he pointed and said, in the first row as he was talking, he said, He ticked off all the people who were sitting in the first row. You know, John Paul, [Thomas] Francis, and Tom Rivers, and then he stopped. He stopped dead. Then he looked at me and said, Juli Youngner's old boss.

TORGHELE: He couldn't even say his name.

YOUNGNER: He could not get the name Jonas Salk out of his mouth. So that gives you some inkling, the mutual feeling.

TORGHELE: I see. It must have been awkward for you when they were having their debates in public.

YOUNGNER: Not at all. Sabin and I, I mean, I got along very well with Albert Sabin. He may have held it against me that I was working with Jonas, but he never showed it to me. We always were cordial with one another.

TORGHELE: That's good.

YOUNGNER: It never spilled over in my relationships with him.

TORGHELE: Some other people are coming to mind at the time that were working on polio. One was Maurice Hilleman. Did you ever have any contact with him or meet him later?

YOUNGNER: Later I had contact with Maurice, yes. I had a lot of contact with him, but other people had tried and, I guess, I don't want to go through all the history of the failed attempts to make vaccine. Cox had tried to use monkey 00:36:00brains. Nobody had any real success using anything but cell culture. This was the breakthrough, really.

TORGHELE: You had some vital contributions in that line for vaccine development. Can you describe how those came about and how they impacted the whole vaccine development?

YOUNGNER: I developed a way of expanding the ability to use primary tissues by using trypsin to disperse the tissues, and that was a big advance. I published three papers about the techniques for doing this and standardizing it. This 00:37:00trypsinization of monkey kidney cortical tissue really was the breakthrough that made it possible to grow large amounts of polio virus. Of course, today they don't use monkey kidney anymore, they use primary human cell line. But in that time this was the standard for producing vaccine with these cell cultures.

I think if I had to tell you what my major contribution would be, it would be in developing cell culture techniques and studying viruses in cell culture. I was there almost at the very beginning of contributing to the initiation of this field in virology. There was something called, I don't remember what it was called, International something Index. My papers were high on the citation index 00:38:00for a number of years because of a technical advance. That's about it.

TORGHELE: Let me go back just a little bit. You've got us right up to the verge of the discovery. When did you start to realize that you had the vaccine? The polio vaccine?

YOUNGNER: 1952.

TORGHELE: And what was it like in the lab about that time? It must have been very exciting.

YOUNGNER: 1952 was the peak of polio in the United States, and we had an 00:39:00incentive. On the third floor of the building we were working in, which was called Municipal Hospital, we were in the first floor and in the basement, but on the third floor, one of the wings was filled with patients in iron lungs. It was a center for paralytic, paralyzed people who needed iron lungs. Going up to that third floor, going into that ward, was enough to make you go back to the lab and work all night. It was horrifying.

TORGHELE: Did you personally know people or have relatives that contracted polio?

YOUNGNER: No. I had a college classmate who married a woman who was a professor at Colombia, who was badly crippled with polio, but that's the only person I 00:40:00ever knew personally. She was very badly crippled with polio that she contracted as a child.

TORGHELE: Something else I was curious about: just right about the time the vaccine was being discovered was, there were political things happening at the same time. I'm thinking about the McCarthy era and all the post-World War II ramifications. Were there things you feel like that influenced the push for polio vaccine, or that impeded it?

YOUNGNER: No. The rise in polio cases, and the realization that it wasn't the disease of infants, but the age group that was being affected was getting older as time went by. So it was a disease of sanitation, as they say, because it was 00:41:00infantile paralysis, because children were, infants were, exposed very early to fecal contamination of one kind or another. It was mostly a disease that was contracted very early in life and most of it, 99.9 percent of it, didn't turn into polio, paralytic polio.

As time went by, ages five to nine became the highest age group, and this is before the vaccine. Then it started to go to the ten- to fourteen-year-olds, and then more and more adults were infected with polio. So it was a societal emergency in a way, that it was becoming so prevalent, and as I say, in 1952 00:42:00there were over fifty thousand cases of polio in the United States that year, paralytic polio. We were working with the realization that if we succeeded, and we were sure we would. There was never any doubt in any of our minds that this was the answer, because we had enough data from monkey experiments and local experiments with schoolchildren that formalinized polio virus killed with formaldehyde, that this was going to be the answer.

TORGHELE: Now, did you get any pushback from people, the live vaccine people, for instance, wondering if you could develop an immune response to a killed virus?

YOUNGNER: Of course. Sabin said it would never work, and there were others on 00:43:00the immunization board who were equally convinced that Sabin was right. Every time it got to a crisis in those discussions, Basil O'Connor would back Jonas no matter how many of them were, what the majority would say. Albert Sabin thought it was a waste of money, and his live virus vaccine, which he was developing, trying to develop, which wasn't licensed until '62. By that time, he couldn't do a field study in the United States. He had to do his field study in Russia because there were so many vaccinated kids in the United States.

TORGHELE: Okay, so I'm getting us a little bit off track, but we've got you up to the point of 1952. You're getting to the point where you know that you were 00:44:00going to have the vaccine that's going to work, so what were the next steps? You did some clinical trials, is that right?

YOUNGNER: Yes. They weren't clinical trials. They were what we would call now Phase I and Phase II trials.

TORGHELE: Vaccine trials?

YOUNGNER: Yes. In other words, we did a small number of children in local schools whose parents volunteered their children. We did small numbers to show that the vaccine didn't do any harm, didn't have any side effects. Also, we bled these children and showed that they had developed antibodies against all three types. This was the trivalent vaccine we were using then. Then we went to a larger group, which would be a Phase II trial in Pittsburgh. The Foundation 00:45:00wanted, and Jonas had promised, to do fifty thousand children, which was ridiculous. We did something like fifteen thousand children in the area, volunteers in the tri-state area here. This was the Phase II trial.

TORGHELE: Now, how did you convince parents to volunteer their children?

YOUNGNER: They were scared to death of polio.

TORGHELE: I see.

YOUNGNER: Nobody ever refused. First of all, we were getting very good publicity in the local papers, promissory notes, so to speak. The parents were absolutely 00:46:00willing, too. Also, we told them we had vaccinated our own kids and ourselves. We did that before we did any other children.

TORGHELE: That must have gone a long way with parents.

YOUNGNER: Yeah. Then we had no trouble doing those ten or fifteen thousand children, and that was also Phase II trial, because we weren't looking for effectiveness against polio, we were just looking for the production of antibody. So we had these thousands of antibody samples to test, and this color test that I developed really made that possible to do that within a short time.

TORGHELE: Tell a little more about the color test and how you could tell there were antibodies.

YOUNGNER: The color test depended on the changing color of a dye that was in the 00:47:00culture medium. The dye was phenol red, and this dye was yellow when it was acidic environment and it was red or purple when it was alkaline environment. We put cells, monkey kidney cells, and the sample in the tube at the same time, and you could titrate by the change in color of the medium in the small tubes. In other words, if the virus killed the cells in two days, the tube would be red. If you had titrated a virus out to the end point, you could test the end point 00:48:00for titrating a virus, because you would get to the point in the dilution series where the tubes were all yellow. You could use like ten tubes for dilution and you could get a statistical titer of the virus. By the same token, if you added antibody to the cells and then added the virus, the antibody would protect the cells against the virus and the tube would stay yellow. This is what the color test was.

TORGHELE: So you could see?

YOUNGNER: You could look at it. You didn't have to have a microscope or anything. You just put them in the incubator. At first we sealed the little tubes with rubber seals, but then we put a little mineral oil on top, which 00:49:00saved a lot of time putting the plugs in the tubes to make sure they were in solid. The little bit of sterile mineral oil on top let the reaction go on without impeding the results. We could do large numbers of blood samples. A technician and I would do hundreds of samples a day. So that was what the color test was. Did I explain it?

TORGHELE: Very well.

YOUNGNER: Okay, thank you.

TORGHELE: So you've gotten the Phase II vaccine trials, and those were the groups known as the Polio Pioneers, is that right?

YOUNGNER: Right.

TORGHELE: Did your children get the little badges they got?

YOUNGNER: No, they got their vaccine long before that. The next step was to do a 00:50:00Phase III trial. That was the big trial that was done in 1954, run by Tommy Francis in Ann Arbor. That was where the placebo was used, placebo injection, so there was a double blind study. It was the largest study, I think, that was ever done, probably ever will be done. It was done over one year, over one summer. There were eight hundred thousand children involved in twelve states. This will never happen again.

TORGHELE: That's a huge trial.

YOUNGNER: Huge trial. Especially to get all those volunteers.

TORGHELE: Right, but wasn't there some controversy too that the media spread, Walter Winchel--

YOUNGNER: Oh, he tried to say it was a killer vaccine.

TORGHELE: There were other naysayers too. Were people skeptical about doing it because of that?

YOUNGNER: A lot of people were, but then came the Cutter incident.

TORGHELE: Well, we'll get to that too. Let's finish up with this third phase and the announcement that it worked, and then I want you to talk about the Cutter incident. So you did the third phase on eight hundred thousand children.

YOUNGNER: Well, we had nothing to do with that. We were hands-off on that, because there would have been a conflict of interest.

TORGHELE: So while you were waiting for these results, what kinds of things were 00:52:00you doing in your lab?

YOUNGNER: Well, I was beginning to work on developing some polio mutants, and I was now going into more scientific aspects of polio virus in cell culture.

TORGHELE: And you had no inkling how the trials were going? You must have known, though, that they were going well.

YOUNGNER: No. No. Not until the announcement on April 12, 1955.

TORGHELE: Tell us what that was like.

YOUNGNER: Well, that was very exciting, to know that it really had succeeded. When Tommy Francis gave the results, and then it was a bittersweet occasion. Have you read Oshinsky's book [David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story]?

TORGHELE: Yes.

YOUNGNER: Well, then, you know the story.

TORGHELE: Yes.

YOUNGNER: I don't like to talk about that.

TORGHELE: Well, it's a part of history now that--

YOUNGNER: Jonas Salk completely thanked everybody, including the dean of the medical school, the head of the nursing, and everybody but the colleagues who worked with him. It was a terrible blow.

TORGHELE: It must have felt terrible.

YOUNGNER: Yes, but then that was painful enough, but the next, I guess you read about that too. It's very painful for me to talk about this Cutter incident.

TORGHELE: You had a part in that, though. You were on your way to San Francisco and you got a call from Cutter Labs.

YOUNGNER: Yes. I was in San Francisco and they called my hotel and said, could I 00:54:00come out and visit their lab for a bit? I said, well, I only have one day here, and they said, well, we'll send a car for you. And they sent a car and chauffeur and they took me out to Oakland where their plant was, and they took me to lunch. And then they went to the plant and they showed me their inactivation curves, and they obviously were doing something that wasn't right. They weren't getting proper inactivation, and they were worried about the batches that they had to throw away.

And then they showed me into the room where the batches were, and I was horrified to find that they had in the same room, they had finished polio vaccine that they were going to distribute, and also inactivating vaccine in the 00:55:00same room, in these big stainless steel vessels. I thought, that's a no, no. You can't do that! I was pretty much horrified by what I had seen, and, as you know, I came back to Pittsburgh and immediately went to see Jonas and told him what I had seen and said, I don't trust their releasing of any vaccine. Because this was just days after the announcement in Ann Arbor.

I was back in Pittsburgh. I said, I don't think Cutter vaccine should be released, because I don't think those guys know what they're doing. I said, I'm going to write a letter to William Workman, who is head of the Division of 00:56:00Biologics at NIH, and to Basil O'Connor, and tell him what's going on so they'll stop it. Jonas says to me, I think it would have more impact if it came from me, and he never wrote the letter. I've looked in the archives in White Plains, New York, and couldn't find anything. And of course the Salk boys wouldn't let me go into the archives, so I couldn't go there and look, but I have a feeling that Basil O'Connor would have stopped Cutter from being distributed. In that sense, being so naive and trusting of Jonas, who had shown me in the past some 00:57:00incidents of not being exactly truthful with me, I should have known better. In some way, I feel responsible for the kids who died because of that.

TORGHELE: You must have felt betrayed.

YOUNGNER: I was completely betrayed, completely. I kept that all to myself for a long time because it was too painful to talk about it. But when the Apollo disaster occurred, you know, the engineers at the Space Center of Cape Canaveral then had told them not to send the space shuttle because it was too cold in the 00:58:00morning, it was much too cold. Because of political reasons they were outvoted, and the rest is history.

TORGHELE: Yeah, it was a similar type thing.

YOUNGNER: I guess Richard Feynman, and when the investigation was going on, Richard Feynman, this great physicist, famous physicist, very bright guy, he took one of the rings and put it in ice water.

TORGHELE: Rings from the rocket?

YOUNGNER: Sealing rings in the rocket, and put it in the ice water and then took it out of the ice water and showed that it just cracked. It's not rubber anymore, or plastic, whatever it was made out of. Anyway, that really, I felt 00:59:00such sympathy for the engineers that tried to warn them, but that was six people died, or eight people. I don't know how many were in that capsule, but the Cutter vaccine caused many more deaths.

TORGHELE: Yeah, but you had done what you could in good conscience and thought it would be taken care of.

YOUNGNER: Yes, but it still haunts me.

TORGHELE: I'm sure it does. So that changed your relationship with Jonas Salk. What did you do next? How did that change your career?

YOUNGNER: Well, it was just a question of time when I would leave the lab. Relations between families had really deteriorated too, because when they got 01:00:00back from Ann Arbor and I was in San Francisco, Donna Salk, his wife, called my wife and said, we're very disappointed that you didn't call and congratulate us. My wife answered, eff you, Donna, and hung up on her. Can you imagine?

TORGHELE: That's pretty amazing!

YOUNGNER: Yeah. So his wife obviously then bought into this whole, the mythmaking was amazing that went on after that. Incredible amounts of money were sent in after Edward R. Murrow, he was on Edward R. Murrow, and when Murrow said 01:01:00that people should send in dimes or dollars, and the money came in, in mail sacks, believe it or not. There never was an accounting of how much money was collected. He never counted, and the dean of the medical school couldn't get an accounting, Jonas wouldn't give it to him. So I don't know whatever happened to that money, but it was quite considerable.

TORGHELE: People must have been so excited about it.

YOUNGNER: Yeah, yeah.

TORGHELE: I understand that Salk was not embraced by the scientific community. And was it, do you think, because the media embraced him and because of the way he presented it?

YOUNGNER: It was a combination of his self-mythologizing and his faux humble 01:02:00personality, and that everybody knew how he treated his colleagues, especially me. That didn't help either. He never did another thing in any publications of any sort after until he died. He did a couple of papers with his son Darrell about improving polio vaccine or something, but he couldn't do anything scientifically.

He was in Pittsburgh and met with a group of graduate students, and one of my graduate students went to this luncheon with Jonas. I guess it was when his portrait was unveiled here. If Jeanie Jordan came back after the luncheon and 01:03:00said, you have to hear this. I said tell me. She said, he said that somebody asked him how many NIH grants he had and he said, I never had an NIH grant because there are no committees that could judge my work. She just was very amused by this, but his ego and his self-aggrandizement was of a kind that I haven't seen again in, except people I don't want to mention.

He was smart. He was affable and he was a great organizer, but he was no scientist.

TORGHELE: Sounds like he was a complex person.

YOUNGNER: Because, you know, I have the satisfaction of having had an NIH grant for thirty-five years straight, with the same number, and I was doing research until I was eighty-nine years old and I developed another vaccine, an equine influenza vaccine. Attenuated, by the way, a live [virus] vaccine for horses. I say there were two vaccines developed at the University of Pittsburgh and I was 01:05:00involved with both of them. It's a satisfaction to me, great satisfaction.

TORGHELE: I know how respected you are in the scientific circles. I wanted to go back just a minute to the Cutter incident again. Because this is a CDC project, I wanted to know if, in the process of the investigation of finding out where the vaccine that was contaminated came from and who it impacted, if you become aware of the CDC's involvement and the people who did the work?

YOUNGNER: I didn't know the people who did the work, but I knew they were involved, because by this time, the vaccines that were on the market were being tested by several different laboratories. There was a short embargo on Cutter 01:06:00vaccine. And the amazing thing, the resilience of this project, that people didn't stop taking the vaccine, because the National Foundation was so well respected, and the blame was all on Cutter and didn't rub off on Jonas Salk.

TORGHELE: Or any of the other pharmaceutical companies.

YOUNGNER: Paul Offit has a book in which he claims to have found evidence that some of the other vaccine companies like Wyeth had produced vaccine that was improperly inactivated too. I guess you read Offit's book, too [Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis]?

TORGHELE: Yes.

YOUNGNER: I can't tell you anything. You already know everything!

TORGHELE: It's not just for me, it's for the Global Health Chronicles, so all of your answers and the way you're answering them are perfect. I also wanted to know, speaking of the different laboratories, did they all use the same sort of recipe to make the vaccine when they first started manufacturing the vaccine? And it came from the Salk and the Pittsburgh lab, is that right?

YOUNGNER: Well, let me tell you that Bazely had developed a fifty-five-page manual on how to prepare the cells in the vaccine, how to inactivate it and all that. What was handed to the companies that were making the vaccine, that manual 01:08:00was given to the three companies that made the vaccine for the field trial, because in the field trial there was no evidence of any untoward reaction in all those six hundred thousand that were vaccinated, I lost my train of thought.

TORGHELE: So we were talking about different pharmaceutical companies.

YOUNGNER: Oh, yeah. Some companies that went into production after that who had been priming themselves for the licensing of the vaccine. They were given a twenty-seven-page manual. The other things that I fought against in the lab, and 01:09:00I fought with Bazely, and Jonas had to settle this argument. We were using something called Seitz filters, which were very slow. The filtration was very slow. Bazely introduced something called sintered-glass filters, this was before the days of the Millipore filters. These were sintered-glass filters, which were, I don't know how they manufactured them, but they had different porosity based on the flow rates.

What I knew from my experience with sintered-glass filters, that if you autoclave them, you have to sterilize them after using them, the porosity 01:10:00changed. There were a lot of breaks in the glass, the weaves in the glass. It wasn't the same filtration rate anymore. In order to speed up the filtration of the preparation, Bazely had introduced sintered-glass filters against my advice, and Jonas agreed with Bazely. I think that, that's what a lot of the problem of Cutter was, too, because by that time they were using sintered-glass filters, because that was part of the protocol that Bazely handed them.

Now they use Millipore filters, which are made out of some kind of synthetic 01:11:00material that keeps the porosity very exact and it doesn't break. They're disposable, you don't re-sterilize them. They're very reliable.

TORGHELE: And do you use those filters to filter out the parts of the virus?

YOUNGNER: What would happen when they filtered, that some of the pieces of tissue with virus still inside would go through. That's what caused the problem. I was called in 1957, '58. Pfizer took me to Folkestone in England, where their plant was in England, because they were beginning to make vaccines for the British, and they were having trouble with inactivation. I asked them, what kind 01:12:00of filters are you using, and they said they're using sintered-glass filters, and I said, that's probably your problem. You should switch back to Seitz. And you know, the interesting thing is, before I left, as the limousine was ready to take me back to London to the airport, they got a telegram from the Ministry of Health saying, stop using sintered-glass filters. I was the hero of the day in Folkestone, I'll tell you. It was a very interesting occurrence.

TORGHELE: It must have been pretty satisfying.

YOUNGNER: Oh, it was a hoot. They were all very excited, and because it was one of these things that happens only a couple of times in a lifetime. Anyway, I was a prophet in their country, and I was correct.

TORGHELE: That must have been fun.

YOUNGNER: So, anything else I can tell you? You're so well-read, I'm telling you a lot of stuff you've probably already know about.

TORGHELE: I love hearing it from you, though. You were there. I can just read about it.

YOUNGNER: I was there.

TORGHELE: I guess to finish up: I'm curious about what you think about the possibility of global eradication of polio.

YOUNGNER: I think they're getting close, they're getting close. It looks like Type II has disappeared now. They're using the bivalent now, and it's certainly circumscribed in geography now. They've got it down, but the last cases are going to be hard to get to, because of the Taliban killing the vaccinators and 01:14:00the religious intolerance and rumors about what the vaccine would do. That's still around, and it's going to be hard work to get the last of cases done. The question then is, are people going to still be carrying the virus and for how long? Because the live virus vaccine revertants are around and causing a lot of, the reason we gave up the vaccine in this country was because the cost benefit wasn't there anymore, because it was causing the polio in the United States. I think that's a factor that the vaccinators are going to have to really take into account.

I think they're getting so close, and I'm just hoping, hoping that they succeed. But it's going to be hard, slogging work to get the last of it done. I wouldn't be surprised if polio pops up here and there after they think they've done it all, because it's not like smallpox, not at all. People can carry this virus for months. There's even been a recent report that virus was found in the stool of an individual twenty-seven years after he was vaccinated.

TORGHELE: That's incredible.

YOUNGNER: So that's the kind of thing, if they stop vaccinating, not until the 01:16:00last case is gone and certified that poliovirus has been eradicated, they won't stop vaccinating in developed countries at all because it's too easily flown from Pakistan to New York City, you know? It's a small world we live in.

TORGHELE: It is a small world, getting smaller, isn't it?

YOUNGNER: Yes. Epidemiologists have to take that into consideration, which they didn't have to do in days gone by.

TORGHELE: Much harder to spread. The travel wasn't so widespread.

YOUNGNER: That's right.

TORGHELE: So do you have any final thoughts? Anything else you would like to mention in the context?

YOUNGNER: No. I think you've covered almost everything. I've left out some of 01:17:00the more painful incidents with Jonas Salk, but I think that's something personal and I don't see that that's any business of the world. But he was quite a dishonest guy. Fortunately, I caught him. The big one I didn't catch.

TORGHELE: You went on with your career and made a success of your life.

YOUNGNER: Oh, yes. My career, I mean, I was several different fields. I was one of the main contributors, one of the main contributors in interferon fields for a number of years, and my lab is the one that discovered gamma interferon, and I 01:18:00did a lot of work on persistent infection, and I had grants up 'til the time I retired.

TORGHELE: Amazing.

YOUNGNER: I had a variety of different areas that I followed my nose, so to speak, where it led me.

TORGHELE: Well, you must have very good instincts as a scientist, too, and creativity.

YOUNGNER: Well, that's nice for you to say. I like the praise.

TORGHELE: Well, I think it's well deserved. So, I guess we should wrap up. It has been such a pleasure talking to you.

YOUNGNER: Thank you, and you ask good questions.

TORGHELE: Oh, thank you. I was excited about being able to meet you by phone, 01:19:00and I hope to meet you in person someday.

YOUNGNER: I would like that.

TORGHELE: Well, thank you again so much, and I hope to see you.

YOUNGNER: Okay, bye.

TORGHELE: Bye bye.

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