The following information has been summarized and excerpted from the Friday, April 17, 1992 edition of The Houston Post with the permission of the authors, Tom Curtis and Patricia Manson. This article is not copyrighted. ************************************************************************ SCIENTIST'S POLIO FEARS UNHEEDED How U.S. researcher's warning was silenced Bernice Eddy wanted to warn doctors that something in the monkey kidneys used to make the world's polio vaccines caused cancer in lab animals. But the U.S. government scientist in charge of making sure polio vaccines were free of dangerous contaminants was silenced, chastised and demoted. Eddy was forced to watch from the sidelines for four years as millions upon millions of people around the world continued to receive vaccines laced with a hard-to-detect monkey virus that caused tumors in baby hamsters. Those vaccinations took place until 1963 while the federal government moved with glacial slowness to consider the problem. What happened to Eddy (who died in 1989) after her historic discovery in 1959 serves as a case study of how the U.S. government operates when faced with an unpleasant possibility it does not want to acknowledge. Eddy's experience also may illuminate the government's sluggish response to the current controversy over recently published theories that contaminated polio vaccines allowed the AIDS virus to leap the species barrier from monkeys to people. Spokesmen for the federal government have discounted the theories. And the Food and Drug Administration has not responded to recommendations by the nation's top AIDS researcher and two pioneering polio scientists that old, stored polio vaccine stocks be tested for contaminants suspected of sparking the AIDS epidemics in Africa and the United States. Like the current theories that polio vaccines may have spawned AIDS, Eddy's suggestion that polio vaccines administered to hundreds of millions of people may have seeded a cancer epidemic was too terrifying for politicians and bureaucrats to accept. Her insights had proved tragically correct before. Eddy had previously warned the government, to no avail, that live polio viruses in the Salk vaccine could cause polio. And it did, producing complete or partial paralysis in about 150 people. "From ancient times the bearer of bad tidings has met with poor reception," notes author Elizabeth Moot O'Hern in the chapter on Eddy in the book "Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists." The book is part of the collection in the Historical Office of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. Eddy, who started working in the NIH's biologics section in 1937, brought bad tidings to her government superiors with her 1959 discovery of the cancer-causing agent. Because that discovery conflicted with the scientific belief off the time that monkey viruses were harmless to people, Eddy met with a cold reception, said Dr. Herbert Ratner of Oak Park, Ill., a former municipal health officer who now edits a small medical journal. "Eddy is one of our great heroines and suffered martyrdom," he said. Other scientists ultimately confirmed Eddy's discovery that a previously undetectable agent contaminating rhesus monkey kidneys produced tumors in baby hamsters. Eddy did not identify the virus, but demonstrated in laboratory tests the cancer-causing propensity of rhesus monkey kidney cell extracts of the sort used to grow polio viruses for vaccines. Before others confirmed Eddy's work, however, higher-ups in the government were "concerned about the accuracy" of her findings, said Dr. Ruth L. Kirschstein, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the basic research arm of the NIH. Kirschstein , who worked with Eddy, said the scientist's superiors questioned her research methods and conclusions. Still, Kirschstein conceded, Eddy was "ahead of the curve" in showing that an infectious agent in the monkey kidneys caused cancer in baby hamsters. However, Eddy's government superiors initially barred her from revealing that problem, O'Hern says in her book. Eddy eventually was allowed to report her findings, but not until 1961. That was two years after her initial discovery and one year after other scientists had isolated the virus, called SV40, that produced tumors in young hamsters. Earlier, Eddy reportedly was the target of retaliation after she strongly urged her superiors to bar further use of vaccines contaminated with the agent later identified as SV40. "Her lab was taken away. Her equipment was taken away," said microbiologist J. Anthony Morris. "She was treated absolutely inhumanely by the officer of the National Institutes of Health." When federal officials suppressed Eddy's findings, she was concerned because "knowledge about scientific discoveries was not being used," said Washington attorney James S. Turner. In 1959, Morris said, Eddy's government superiors "scoffed" at her findings about SV40 "and said there was this possibility that the hamsters had developed tumors spontaneously." And after limited investigation over the next several years, scientists decided that the virus probably did not cause cancer in human beings. In the decades following the discovery of SV40, however, a number of disturbing reports linked the virus to brain tumors and other cancers in people. Shortly after finding the cancer-causing agent later identified as SV40, Eddy got permission to discuss her work at a meeting of the New York Cancer Society. But after that talk, Eddy "got the hell bawled out of her" by her government superior, said Ratner, the editor of the medical journal Child and Family. Eddy's boss, Joseph E. Smadel, told her in a letter that "you have apparently stirred up a hornets nest, and there are some who are sufficiently credulous to believe that the use of monkey kidney tissue culture in man may induce cancer in them." Smadel ordered Eddy to submit a written manuscript for review when seeking permission to speak before a scientific group, according to a 1987 article by Ratner in Child and Family. Eddy was demoted , O'Hern writes in her book, "and was moved into smaller and smaller quarters with fewer and fewer assistants." Within the scientific community, two pharmaceutical company researchers, B.H. Sweet and M.R. Hilleman of the Merck Institute for therapeutic Research, got credit for finding SV40. In 1960, the pair reported a "new" virus that silently infected nearly all rhesus monkeys, whose kidneys were used to produce polio vaccines. Hilleman and Sweet wrote that the discovery of SV40 demonstrated that viruses could "be present in monkey kidney cell cultures but not detectable by current procedures." Because it did not cause symptoms in the host species, SV40 was detected only after it was introduced into a cell culture of a different monkey species. In their 1960 paper, the Merck scientists addressed what they called the "highly theoretical" possibility that unknown viruses like SV40 might cause cancer, "especially when administered to human babies." They acknowledged that it might take decades to find the answer to that question. Hilleman and Sweet noted that SV40 was present in all three types of Dr. Albert B. Sabin's live oral polio vaccine, but incorrectly asserted that SV40 was killed by the formaldehyde used to inactivate Dr. Jonas Salk's killed-polio-virus vaccine. Ultimately, Eddy's discovery that the Sabin and Salk vaccines contained the agent later identified as SV40 prompted great concern among scientists, bureaucrats and politicians. But the SV episode was not the first -- or last -- time federal officials ignored Eddy's Warnings that a vaccine contained a potentially harmful element. About 150 people were completely or partly paralyzed by polio after federal officials reportedly brushed aside Eddy's 1955 discovery that several lots of Salk's supposedly killed-poliovirus vaccine contained a live virus capable of causing the disease. Eleven of those victims died, say Aaron Klein in the book "Trial by Fury." That scandal contributed to the departure from the federal government of then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby of Houston. In another incident, according to Morris and Turner, HEW in 1960 barred Eddy from publishing her discovery that an adenovirus vaccine designed to prevent cold-like symptoms could cause cancer in hamsters. Allegations that Eddy's scientific findings had been suppressed first surfaced publicly in 1971 during a hearing before a U.S. Senate subcommittee looking into the cost and effectiveness of vaccines. These allegations were made by Turner and Morris, then a microbiologist with the NIH, who claimed government officials blocked publication of this work and forced him from the laboratory after he questioned the safety and effectiveness of flu vaccines. The fallout from the Senate subcommittee hearing came swiftly. By the following summer, responsibility for assuring the purity and effectiveness of vaccines was taken from the NIH and given to the Food and Drug Administration. Morris was allowed to resume his research, but was fired a few years later during the administration of President Gerald Ford. The FDA commissioner accused Morris of Insubordination, while Morris said he was targeted because he criticized, the government's disastrous swine flu vaccination program. Vaccine recipients or their survivors sought nearly $1 billion in damages from the federal government for injuries stemming from the aborted program. Hundreds of people, including 23 who died, developed a rare, paralyzing disease after being inoculated with the swine flu vaccine. Turner, who represented Morris in his disputes with the government, said both Morris and Eddy encountered a bureaucracy that did not want to hear bad news. Unlike Morris, however, Eddy was not dismissed from her job, Turner said. She continued to work for the government until she retired in 1973 at the age of 70. "Bernice Eddy was also a strong protector of the public," turner said. "But rather than being humiliated or fired or pushed out of government, she was marginalized. ************************************************************************