Polio Virus Research History

They had tried to purify, you know, virus

particles out of samples since the electron microscope

was invented where they could visualize particles this small, and they were never

able to successfully do those experiments.

So what they did, polio, you know, was, was hypothesized

to be spread by the oral route. And so

they did an experiment where they had a child who died

of polio, and they took the spinal cord tissue

that was

diseased and put it in some, some liquid, like water,

maybe added a little salt or buffer.

They chopped it up in a blender, and then they tried to expose

monkeys to this, and they first tried to, you know, have

them swallow it because they thought that's how polio was spread.

And none of the monkeys got polio or got sick at all.

So they decided, for some reason, and rather than giving up

and finding another, uh, hypothesis that they could test,

they doubled down and decided to inject

that rotting spinal cord flesh from the dead sick child

into the monkeys. And you'd think that just injecting any

rotting flesh into a monkey would make the monkey sick, but it didn't.

The monkeys were quite resilient.

So even injecting it didn't get the monkey sick.

So they didn't give up still. Even though this wasn't

successful, they tripled down and they decided to

drill a hole in the monkeys' skulls and inject

the rotting flesh from the spinal cord of a

dead child and inject it directly into the brain.

And lo and behold, it was astonishing that injecting

dead rotting flesh directly into the brain did make the monkey

sick.

But it didn't give them polio. It didn't cause a spinal cord lesion,

but it did

make them sick and some of them died and they said, "Voila.

We've now proved that polio is caused by a virus."