Today, when many parents seem reluctant to have their children
vaccinated, even with long proven medications, the Salk vaccine
trial, which enrolled millions of healthy children to test an
unproven medical intervention, seems nothing short of astonishing.
In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts
the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio
using healthy children - 55,000 healthy children - revealing how
this long-forgotten incident cleared the path for Salk's later
trial. Mawdsley describes how, in the early 1950s, Dr. William
Hammon and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis launched
a pioneering medical experiment on a previously untried scale.
Conducted on over 55,000 healthy children in Texas, Utah, Iowa, and
Nebraska, this landmark study assessed the safety and effectiveness
of a blood component, gamma globulin, to prevent paralytic polio.
The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many
prominent health professionals as it harbored potential health
risks, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it
forward. And though the trial returned dubious results, it was
presented to the public as a triumph and used to justify a
federally sanctioned mass immunization study on thousands of
families between 1953 and 1954. Indeed, the concept, conduct, and
outcome of the GG study were sold to health professionals, medical
researchers, and the public at each stage. At a time when most
Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the
auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing,
and at times, deception. Drawing on oral history interviews,
medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private
institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of
scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public
opinion about medical experimentation.
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