The misty view through a half century of time obscures my memories. But, a few beacons remain. I was a just boy. And infantile paralysis -- poliomyelitis – reined as a scourge like no other. It rivaled today’s Alzheimer’s disease. It transformed summer into a time of fear. It made swimming pools anathema. No one was safe from an affliction that could strike, cobra-like, with devastating and deadly swiftness. No one was immune. No one could know whether they had just contracted a mere summer cold or the ominous onset of dreaded polio. It targeted little children, young adults in their prime, and yes the aged as well. A lucky few got injections of gamma globulin to safeguard them during the hazardous months of July and August. Stunning, heartbreaking images of people condemned to a lifetime in iron longs or crutches were emblazoned everywhere. The March of Dimes crusaded like a Labor Day Telethon every single day of the year – for years and years.
As a virologist, my father became engulfed in the state-of-the-art immunology of its day. For, he participated in the race to develop a safe and effective oral polio vaccine. It was a torturous, pressure-packed endeavor fraught with peril. For oral polio vaccine was, after all, the live virus itself, in attenuated form. Researchers and clinicians from competing factions alike struggled with things like reversion to virulence and the hazards of attenuation in monkey kidney tissue culture. Ten of millions of 1950s-era dollars were spent. Scientific reputations soared and crashed and soared again. And, patients in clinical trials did die.
In the end of course, a successful vaccine was developed. But it consumed vast amounts of time. Years and years stretched into decades. Human patience and initiative were stretched to the breaking point. Strain after strain after strain was isolated, tested, attenuated and then tested again. After all that effort, most were summarily abandoned as unsafe. And then, the entire process had to be started anew.
The team that included my father lost their battle. For it was the vaccine strains from a competing effort that ultimately garnered the first government license. But they won the war. For only my father’s team had devised the methodology to attenuate, to grow the vaccine -- safely -- in ordinary chicken eggs. And hence only they could mass produce it.
It had been a lengthy, arduous and painstaking process. But now came the rewards. Now, the victor had to come, hat in hand, to the vanquished. And surrender a large hoard of their spoils to get the vaccine made in volume.
The costs my father personally bore did not escape me, young as I was. He was absent for months at a time for clinical trials in far-off lands. Which did not always go well. The pressure, the perils, the politics all took their toll. I saw his vigorous, vibrant and sunny disposition eclipsed by a sometimes stormy, distant and sullen demeanor. My father died later – now long ago – in some ways a man spent and made gray before his full time.
And so now we come to the case of Elan. And Alzheimer’s disease.
Now I am a man not even remotely close to my father. For I am a lowly, merely, retired writer. Toiling on an anonymous message board. He was a world class virologist. He truly contributed to the advancement of science. I only dare speak of it.
But even I can grasp the haunting parallels from the days of my father. I see the devastation with no effective treatment. I can sense Elan scientists and immunologists and clinicians slowly, steadily, methodically progressing against it. It has taken years and years. Yes, there have been setbacks. And yes, patients in clinical trials have died. Even so, years ago I decided to make the biggest commitment I have ever made in my life. I took the largest position I dared in Elan, during its darkest days. And have held on like a terrier to a rat. Like lag bolt in southern yellow pine. Like solsticial sun over the Sahara.
Because I believed. Because, somehow, I knew.
Because others – hugely more knowledgeable and intelligent than I – gave unselfish, unstinting, sound and sagacious counsel to bolster me. Because a community of people cared not only about making money in the stock market, but also cared about pure science, about humans can help each other, about how illness can be conquered.
And now finally the uncertainty has cleared. We stand at the clinically-demonstrated cusp of at least one -- and likely more -- immunological treatments that can alter the course of Alzheimer’s disease -- for the first time. We can now look forward to day when such treatments will be administered -- prophylactically – preventatively -- to otherwise healthy persons. Who have been genetically identified at increased risk for the disease. We can hope for immunology that forestalls, that blunts, a devastating and deadly scourge as surely as Elan’s Tysabri treats multiple sclerosis – as surely as the oral polio vaccine did a half century ago.
Maybe it is only just my imagination, but somehow I see my father - once again as sunny and vigorous and vibrant as he was in his prime. And from above he is looking down on me and saying..
…well done, my son….well done.
And so in turn I say to you all, on this mortal earth, from the bottom of my heart…
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
June 2008
