 showed that an oral vaccine could protect millions against polio.)
ALLIES: Although their countries were at odds, Albert B. Sabin and Mikhail P. Chumakov (pictured) showed that an oral vaccine could protect millions against polio.
Image: RIA Novosti
In Brief
- At the height of the cold war, paralytic polio was one of the few things that frightened Americans and Russians more than each other.
- Newly available documents detail the unlikely collaboration between Albert B. Sabin of the U.S. and Mikhail P. Chumakov of the U.S.S.R. to fight the infection.
- Together Sabin and Chumakov proved that a vaccine against polio made with weakened strains of the virus was both safe and effective.
- A global campaign against polio using the live-virus vaccine has decreased the number of polio cases worldwide from 350,000 in 1988 to around 650 in 2011.
To many Americans, the cold war is ancient history. Yet only a few decades ago the planet was dangerously divided between West and East, and the antagonism between the U.S. and the Soviet Union defined global politics. Flare-ups such as the Korean “police action,” which killed millions of people in the early 1950s, and the Cuban missile crisis, 10 years later, drew the American and Soviet governments and their proxies to the threshold of nuclear war.
At the same time, Americans lived in mortal fear of an enemy much closer to home. That enemy was polio—short for poliomyelitis, also known as infantile paralysis because of its prevalence among children and young adults. Scientists had known its cause—a virus spread via contact with fecal matter—since the 1930s, but its control eluded them. During sporadic epidemics authorities closed swimming pools, movie houses and other popular gathering spots, hoping to contain the disease, which attacked the central nervous system, often crippling and sometimes killing its victims. Newsreel footage of toddlers with twisted limbs and teenagers lying helplessly on their backs in coffinlike iron lungs frightened the public as few of the era’s images did.
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2 Comments
Add CommentThere was cooperation between US and USSR sicentists not only during the "cold war" times, but the US supplied the soviets before WWII with top technology, for example aircraft engines, and american movies made during the war did idealize the fight of Russian communists against Hitler. The reasons why the USA preferred the criminal communists to the nazi criminals remains a mistery for me. Neutrality remains the best approach for other's wars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInspiring read. But I think it is to some degree too convenient to label them as cold war scientists. In the post-WWII period, many scientists believed in international collaboration that can transcend politics, although many of their works were inevitably obstructed by it. These scientists became apologists of 'pure science' that serves as a humanitarian instrument during the postwar times.
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