The Great Influenza by John M Barry
Author:John M Barry [Barry, John M]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2004-10-09T13:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHILE PARK TRIED to produce an antiserum or vaccine against the disease in New York, Philadelphia was already approaching collapse. Its experience would soon be echoed in many cities around the country.
There Paul Lewis was searching for the answer as well. Few, including Park, were more likely to find it. The son of a physician, Lewis grew up in Milwaukee, went to the University of Wisconsin, and finished his medical training at Penn in 1904. Even before leaving medical school he knew he intended to spend his life in the laboratory, and he quickly acquired both a pedigree and a well-deserved reputation. He started as a junior investigator working on pneumonia under Welch, Osler, Biggs, and several others who comprised the Rockefeller Institute's Board of Scientific Advisers. Lewis impressed them all. Most impressed was Theobald Smith, one of the world's leading bacteriologists, for whom Lewis then worked in Boston. Later Smith recommended Lewis to Simon Flexner, saying that Harvard lacked the resources to allow Lewis to develop fully and that '[h]is heart lies in research.'
From Smith there could come no higher compliment. Lewis deserved it. He seemed born for the laboratory. At least that was the only place where he was happy; he loved not only the work itself but the laboratory environment, loved disappearing into the laboratory and into thought. 'Love' was not too strong a word; his passions lay in the lab. At Rockefeller, Lewis had started off pursuing his own ideas but when a polio epidemic erupted Flexner asked him to work with him on it. He agreed. It was a perfect match. Their polio work was a model combination of speed and good science. They not only proved that polio was a viral disease, still considered a landmark finding in virology, but they developed a vaccine that protected monkeys from polio 100 percent of the time. It would take nearly half a century to develop a polio vaccine for humans. In the course of this research Lewis became one of the leading experts in the world on viruses.
Flexner pronounced Lewis 'one of the best men in the country,' a very gifted fellow.' That may have been an understatement. Richard Shope worked closely with him in the 1920s, knew many of the world's best scientists (including Flexner, Welch, Park, Williams, and many Nobel laureates) and himself became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He called Lewis the smartest man he ever knew. Joseph Aronson, a prize-winning University of Pennsylvania scientist who had also done research at the Pasteur Institute, named his son after Lewis and, like Shope, said Lewis was the brightest man he had ever met.
When the war began, Pearce, the National Research Council official, told Lewis what he told only four or five other scientists in the country: to expect to be asked 'for special service in connection with epidemic disease.'
Lewis was ready. He received a navy commission and told Flexner he had 'no onerous routine duties.' His laboratory abilities were far more important.
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