February is Black History Month in the United States, and we take this month to make a particular emphasis on the work and contributions of African Americans to the history of vaccines. This month, our social media avatars are Dr. Russell W. Brown and Dr. James H. M. Henderson. Drs. Brown and Henderson worked behind the scenes to, , “serve humanity in a time when their humanity was often denied.” Their work was being done in the 1950s, in the South. As Ainissa Ramirez reminded us, “[n]ot far from them, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment was underway.”
The year was 1953, and Jonas Salk and his team had just finished creating their best candidate for a polio vaccine. They still needed to prove the vaccine worked. To do this, they enlisted the services of the Tuskegee Institute (). The plan was to take HeLa cells grown in a Petri dish, and challenge those cells with live poliovirus. Into that mix would go the serum of a person vaccinated against polio. If the person had created the right kinds of antibodies, the polio in the mix would be neutralized, and the cells would remain intact. The use of the HeLa cells was necessary as they were found to grow quickly in the lab. The legacy of those cells -- -- is a subject we will also address this month.
Under the direction of Brown and Henderson, researchers at the Tuskegee Institute figured out how to grow enough HeLa cells to ship all over the country as the clinical trials for the polio vaccine were about to begin. These shipped cells needed to be free from contaminants and, most importantly, viable at the time of performing the tests necessary to show if the vaccine worked. The team perfected laboratory processes that would become the standard for cell growth in their era and set the foundation for future standards.
To read more about their work, we recommend the following articles:
- “Hidden Black Scientists Proved the Polio Vaccine Worked: Tuskegee Institute researchers showed Jonas Salk’s vaccine protected children by developing a key test” by Ainissa Ramirez for Scientific American. Available online:
- “Development of the Polio Vaccine: A Historical Perspective of Tuskegee University’s Role in Mass Production and Distribution of HeLa Cells” by Timothy Turner, PhD, for Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. Available online:
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