A large crowd gathered in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium May 11 to hear author David M. Oshinsky Ph.D. '71 discuss his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Polio: An American Story, last Friday. Oshinsky, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, published the book in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his detailed account of the polio epidemic of the 1950s and the frantic search for a cure.

After a brief summary of the disease and its effect, Oshinsky took the audience behind the scenes of the challenges and rivalries that led to the creation of the two polio vaccines. He told the stories of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, pioneering Jewish scientists who created the vaccines and overcame rampant discrimination in the field to procure the necessary funding for their research via the March of Dimes charity organization.

Oshinsky emphasized the brilliance behind the March of Dimes, the first campaign to employ the concept of the "poster child" and to use celebrities to encourage millions of Americans to donate to the cause.

"[The March of Dimes] revolutionized medical research," he said, by being the first organization to give researchers long-term grants. The organization funded "aggressive, ambitious, bright researchers" to answer questions such as how polio travels through the body. Since at the time the federal government gave no money for medical research, Oshinsky said, the March put tremendous effort toward fundraising among private citizens.

He went on to describe his theories behind the success of America's efforts to eliminate the disease, describing it as a "white middle-class disease" that rallied the wealthy and influential to the cause of a cure.

"The March of Dimes had the perfect disease," Oshinsky said of the predominantly child victims who easily engendered sympathy.

In 1954, millions of parents stepped forward to have their children test out Salk's vaccine in what Oshinsky called the "largest public health experiment in history."

"The parents of America lined up their kids to take these polio shots. They had great faith in the March of Dimes," he said.

Oshinsky said his own mother pushed him to the front of the line, her reasoning being, "Salk's Jewish; we're Jewish; how bad could it be?"

After the results were analyzed, Salk was hailed as a savior of America's children, he said. "Post-war America was the era of the baby boom and the era of Dr. Spock, and children meant everything."

Oshinsky also illuminated the personal politics behind the vaccines, particularly the seething rivalry between Salk, whose vaccine became the most widely used, and Sabine, whose vaccine went unused in the United States until the 1960s. Sabine always claimed that his live-virus version of the vaccine was more effective.

"Albert Sabine was the scientist's scientist; Jonas Salk was the people's scientist [...] the white knight in the lab coat," Oshinsky said.

Today, a "juiced up version" of Salk's vaccine is used, but the efforts of both men were crucial to finding a cure, he said.

Much of the audience at Oshinsky's talk was composed of elderly men and women who either remembered the Polio outbreak and the mass vaccinations, or were former victims of the disease. Several shared their experiences during the question-and-answer period following the lecture.

One audience member asked Oshinsky to comment on the March of Dimes' withdrawal of support from the cause of polio eradication, a move which left many survivors living painfully with Post-Polio Syndrome, which includes a new weakening of muscles years after the disease and allowed the disease to continue in many other parts of the world.

Oshinsky commented on the social aspects of the issue, stating that Polio was no longer "a sexy disease," and is now being forsaken in favor of issues that still affect the white middle class of America, such as premature births and cancer. "Did the March of Dimes desert the Polio cause? Yes, they did."

Although America is free of the disease, Oshinsky warned, Pakistan, India and countries in Africa are still suffering from its ravages.