Today in 1911, the birthday of Isabel Morgan, a scientist and researcher whose breakthroughs in polio helped protect millions of kids from that terrible disease.
Morgan grew up in Massachusetts; her parents were both scientists, and one of them went on to win a Nobel Prize.
She got her own PhD in bacteriology, and eventually worked in a lab at Johns Hopkins University, where she and her colleagues helped figure out some of the mysteries surrounding polio.
There had been research on a polio vaccine before this team, but those projects had run into problems making a vaccine effective.
Morgan’s team figured out why: there were three strains of poliovirus responsible for outbreaks, not just one.
Scientists had long thought that the only viable path to a vaccine was using live viruses, which raised concerns that some people trying to avoid polio would end up catching it.
The Johns Hopkins researchers also determined just how many antibodies it would take for a person to be protected from polio.
And they proved that a vaccine using inactivated viruses could work in mammals.
Some medical historians say that if Isabel Morgan had continued on with this work, we would talk today about the Morgan vaccine instead of the one from Jonas Salk that came several years later.
But that’s not what happened.
Morgan left her research team before the polio research progressed to human trials.
According to some sources, Morgan had told friends she was concerned about the way live testing worked on children at that time.
Scientists would eventually address those concerns, but by then Morgan was working on other projects while also focusing on her family.
She continued working and researching until 1980.
And while she didn’t become famous for her polio research, she did get some acclaim.
In Warm Springs, Georgia, there’s a place called the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, and on a wall there, you’ll find something called the Polio Hall of Fame.
It’s a series of busts of people who helped study and stop the spread of polio.
And right there in the middle of all of them is a bust of Isabel Morgan.
Certain young people in my house are huge fans of board games, which means we have large shelving units full of boxes and boards and pieces and cards and all sorts of game stuff.
There’s a new device called Pixply, which is a digital game board – you select which game you want to play in the app and all of a sudden you’ll have the right lines and squares and spaces for that game.
Plus, you can roll the board up and take it with you when you want to play games wherever you go.
Forging the Trail for Polio Vaccination: Isabel Morgan and Dorothy Horstmann (American Society for Microbiology)
Pixply Rollable Digital Game Board (The Awesomer)
Keep this show healthy as a backer on Patreon
Image via Wikicommons
