from the New Yorker by Howard Markel, a professor at the University of Michigan, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Ed Note: Thomas Francis, Jr. is the father of one of our residents–Mary Jane!
On the morning of April 12, 1955, an epidemiologist named Thomas Francis, Jr., took the stage of the Rackham Auditorium, at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Short and portly, in his mid-fifties, with a long face and a close-clipped mustache, Francis was there to deliver a ninety-minute lecture on the vaccine field trial he had just completed. The trial had evaluated the efficacy of the poliovirus vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, a former postdoc in Francis’s lab.
An influenza researcher, Francis was known among scientists for his deft direction of complex flu-vaccine trials during the Second World War. He had taught Salk the techniques necessary for developing “killed virus” vaccines—shots in which large quantities of a virus are disabled in a formaldehyde solution, then introduced to the human immune system in order to prompt the production of antibodies. Today, no bioethics panel would allow Francis to run a safety trial for a vaccine developed by someone he knew so well. But rules were more relaxed back then—and, in any case, Francis’s reputation was so sterling that, as the Salk biographer Jane S. Smith has written, “even the most dedicated opponent of the new vaccine could never say a trial supervised by Francis was political, biased, or incomplete.”
Francis’s lecture was awaited breathlessly by the American public. Few diseases have inspired more fear than polio. During the first half of the twentieth century, summertime polio epidemics left wakes of paralysis and death behind them, forcing summer camps, movie theatres, and public pools to close. Newspapers regularly featured horrific images of children struggling to walk or breathe. Adults also suffered: after contracting the virus in 1921, when he was thirty-nine, Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to use a wheelchair or leg braces for the rest of his life.