Spines Chilled
Margin of Safety. By John Rowan Wilson. (Collins, 21s.) Life magazine has just run an article on 'The Great New Dream of Dr. Salk': prefaced by a picture which shows him standing on a cliff top, surveying the Pacific from the site on which his new Institute of Biological Studies will arise. There, a 'brilliant international array of scien- tists'—including, inevitably, Sir Charles Snow and Dr. Bronowski—will be gathered together in a cloister-like but congenial atmosphere, in the hope that the resultant susurration of fine minds will produce 'an explosive expansion of human knowledge.' The scientists will be free to work on whatever projects they please: Salk him- self dreams of finding 'a single, absolutely harm- less vaccine which, administered early in life, might protect the individual against 10, 50 or 100 virus diseases.' I hope it keeps fine for them.
Jonas Salk, as Margin of Safety shows, is in a sense a by-product of the industry founded by Paul de Kruif in his Microbe Hunters series before the war; a dedicated scientist of no par- ticular distinction caught up, through no fault of his own, in a publicity stunt that he cannot control. Dr. Wilson is not a debunker in the ordinary sense of the term : he is merely con- cerned to describe in meticulous detail the history of how polio vaccines came to be dis- covered and manufactured, and of the inter- necine warfare that broke out between rival scientists (and their backers) striving for supremacy. As the British representative of one of the US pharmaceutical houses, Dr. Wilson was concerned in the trials himself; but there is never any hint of punch-pulling—or of unfair- ness to past adversaries: when he is harsh, his strictures seem abundantly justified, notably in the case of Oveta Culp Hobby, Secretary at Health. Her career represents a rare, and there. fore all the more welcome, instance of political poetic justice: so anxious was she to ride the initial wave of Salk publicity that she became identified with it, and her career did not long survive the Cutter crisis which showed that the vaccine was not so safe, after all.
Dr. Salk himself cannot escape blame. Whether or not he was responsible for the initial 'leak' which led to his vaccine being put on the market before its manufacturing processes had been adequately tested remains uncertain; and he appears to have been disconcerted by the fervour of the public reaction. But he allowed himself to be used to exploit it, and he made glibly optimistic comments about his vaccine which, as Dr. Wilson says, are spine-chilling in retrospect. 'It is safe,' Dr. Salk insisted, 'and you can't get safer than safe,' only a few weeks before reports from California and other States revealed that the vaccine from the Cutter laboratories was far from safe.
The real value of Margin of Safety is the quiet way it reveals how Salk and the other main characters were neither heroes nor villains, but ordinary men moved by forces too powerful for them. Commercial pressure was one; yet, en balance, private enterprise comes less badly out of the whole business than the State. The Russians opted for the Sabin vaccine, and de- veloped it; but this was a lucky guess. Dr. Wilson suspects that if they had happened to ge for the Salk vaccine, and a 'Cutter' episode had followed, it would never have been published; and rival scientists like Sabin would not have been allowed to pursue the search for a 'live vaccine—they would have been recruited to work on the Salk type to try to make it safer.
It now is safer—but it just isn't effective, corn' pared to the Sabin live Naccine—something nobody would ever have known if authoritarian methods of testing had been dominant. On these matters Dr. Wilson is a dispassionate, if not a disinterested, witness; and his Margin of SafetY is a model of how a medical work designed for lay Consumption should be written : lucid, fail. and—considering the attention to detail—re' markably readable.
BRIAN INGLIS
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