Facinating Archival Video on Polio Vaccine
December 4th, 2009
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If you’ve never been to archive.org, I highly suggest checking it out, in addition to a number of useful tools, such as the “Wayback Machine,” the site has a huge library of public domain videos and motion pictures. These include a number of historic informational motion pictures from the 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. These range from product promotional films to newsreels to government produced films of all varieties. From those goofy films once shown in middle school on topics like hygiene to declassified military commanders reports, you could spent countless hours checking out these films.
This particular clip is on the early production of polio vaccine. It’s quite an interesting look at the laboratories where the vaccine was produced and tested. It’s amazing the steps that were taken to assure that the vaccine doses were sterile and met tight quality control standards. Today, the process would look much different, but the underlying principle is the same. Manual pipetting and transferring of fluids has been replaced by automated and robotic systems. Glassware has largely been replaced by single-use plastic containers and huge advancements have been made in tissue culturing and growing organisms in the laboratory. Yet while it may look very different, the science is the same.
Of course, at the time this was produced, the world had a much different view of vaccination. With polio still rampant in the industrial world and children and adults being crippled by the disease, the vaccine was seen as an extremely positive contribution to health and humanity. Today, it is still seen this way by those who know the science of vaccination and the history of humanity’s struggle with infectious disease, yet a new class of ignorance and fear-driven anti-vaccine groups exist that would have shocked many in the 1950’s, who lived in fear of loss of life or mobility due to polio or any number of other diseases, which have since been conquered by vaccination.
(In case the embeded video does not work, here is a link to the original)
It’s very interesting to note the care and preparation used in the production, even so many years ago. Some anti-vaxers will claim that vaccines are a witches brew of dead animal tissue, monkeys, chemicals and microbes. Nothing could be further from the truth. While cell tissue cultures are used to grow virus cultures, this does not mean that they the end product is simply ground up tissue. Viruses require the use of host organisms to reproduce and therefore, unlike bacteria, they cannot be cultured in simple nutrient solutions, but rather require a living cellular medium. The in vitro culturing is very tightly controlled and monitored in order to provide an enviornment that replicates the conditions in an organism well enough for the viruses to easily multiply while at the same time preventing foreign contamination of the samples. After growing the viral material, a precise process of extraction and refinement is used to seperate the viral agent, assure that it has been neutralized and finally to package it for administration.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Culture, Good Science, History, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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December 5th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Sorry, but you are wrong. Jonas Sulk did not invent a cure for polio, he just spread polio more with those before him and gave people a minor infection of polio (which is what the injection is). Polio is from bad water with sewage in it and that is the reason it went down, because of the water improvement. Vaccines never actually helped anyone. Do some research! Read the truth! Polio was going down BEFORE THE VACCINE and the vaccine did nothing.
The vaccine is injected right into your blood, no buffer, no way the body can protect itself and it is made from dead monkeys and is full of mercury, aluminum, formeldehide all kinds of other very very nasty stuff. It’s disgusting what is in it and if you had any idea you’d be revolted.
You know what the point of injecting trash into our bodies is? Keep us in a constant state of sickness so we need to buy more drugs. This is all profit driven. These are companies making money off of your body. Fill it up with ground up monkeys and mercury and then you end up with every disease you can think of. Cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, autism, cancer are all on the rise. Why? Because you take meds to keep them down and that means money. Well people don’t make money for big pharma, so think about it. Why on earth would they want to prevent disease?
So yeah, you live an unhelathy life once this is in your body and they laugh all the way to the bank. What a world! What a country! AMerica! Corrupt and greedy from top to bottom and everyone is sick because of it.
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December 5th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Geez. Did it have to be the first comment? How do people like that even end up on this page. That is what I always wonder. When it’s a youtube video, I have to figure they follow back the link to the pages it is embeded in, but this? What? People just google searching for pages to go spout this at?
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December 5th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Curious then that if it was bad water and sewage that we had two outbreaks in the Netherlands since
the 70’s where that definitely was not the case. But was clearly a case of not being vaccinated on
account of religious reasons, in both cases in strongly religious areas. Both in 1978 and in 1992 there
was an outbreak because of that reason.
See http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis, which is in Dutch.
It irritates mee that people forget those cases even though they are quite recent, I mean 1992 is
not even twenty years ago. It is painful to see those foto’s of children deformed by a disease that is
so well preventable in this day and age. People seem to forget that the reason these vaccins where
developed was because of the deaths and deformeties caused by disease like this.
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December 5th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I would be cold and heartless and say: “Let them all suffer” except of course the problem is when the children of anti-vaxer’s become sick with these diseases they infect others who *are* inoculated.
Chris said:
Oh really. You are wrong. The evidence that refutes your bold claim is that there are countless people out there who, 99% of the time are not sick in any way and do not buy drugs constantly. Also, America is not the only country who has vaccination programs.
I have received all the vaccines that are recommended for both children/adolescents in my country, and I am not in some kind of constant state of sickness that you mention. Nor are any of my family members, or friends, that I know of.
The last time I brought some drugs was probably when I last had a cold, or are you claiming that the common cold fits into your crazy conspiracy somehow as well?
Of course, there is no scientifically verifiable and irrefutable evidence you can show us to prove you are right, and so everyone else (the majority of the human population…) will say you must be wrong, but you’ll continue to believe in your delusions until the day you die.
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December 5th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
When I was a youngin polio was still around. I don’t remember the time before the vaccine, but I do remember the time when it was very new and it had not gotten to everyone yet. People would stand in line with their children for the vaccine. People lived in real fear of polio, because it could kill or cripple you for life and it did not discriminate. Good hygene and water are great, but this disease could strike anyone, even FDR, who was from a rich society family lost most of his mobility due to polio.
I think at the time, the vaccine was seen as a huge relief. No more need to worry about this horrible disease. It is amazing to me, that we have come so far, since then, in so many ways and our science has improved, but in some ways we have taken a step backward. If you don’t vaccinate your child today, there are numerous people who will say that they support you and your right to choose how to live your life etc. Others will encourage you not to and tell you it’s the only way to be healthy.
If you had voluntarily avoided polio vaccination in the late 1950’s to early 1960’s, any person would look you square in the eye and say “What are you, insane? What the hell did you do that for??”
Of course, this is not an issue exclusive to polio either. One of my cousins had a terrible case of the mumps when I was younger and he lost most of the hearing in his left ear and a small amount in his right.
I had measles when I was a young child. It’s a hazy early memory, but I can definitely remember it because it was a horrible experience. Full body rash that hurt when you put weigt on it. Sit down and your backside (and male bits) hurt like you would not believe. Lay on your side and your side hurt like you would not believe. I was left standing up crying, as I was only something like 6 years old. God it’s horrible. The rash turns brown and gets crusty before it goes away. I felt lucky later though, before the mass deployment of the vaccine older children in my class got it and a couple missed many weeks of school. You can get pneumonia from that and have to be hospitalized.
Then there’s whooping cough. There’s another unpleasent one for you and it also kills from time to time. You cough like crazy, you can’t stop coughing repeatedly to the point you wear your throat raw and start coughing blood. They sometimes put you on codine and tranqualizers and that kind of thing just to stop the crazy spasms of coughing.
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December 5th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Gordon said:
True for most cases, especially those who are very young. On the other hand, I had whooping cough when I was in my last year of highschool (I had received the vaccine when I was a child) and it was no worse than a typical chest infection / bronchitis. Infact, that’s what I thought I had until my doctor eventually confirmed it by blood tests.
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December 5th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Yeoz said:
I wonder if having an early inoculation, even if it were not maintained with “booster” shots would still be enough to at least keep the infection from getting too bad.
I honestly don’t know if that would have had anything to do with it or not. Perhaps someone here would know?
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December 6th, 2009 at 1:09 am
I remember back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, one of the biggest promoters of the vaccine was the March Of Dimes. The March Of Dimes considered the development of the Polio vaccine one of the biggest (if not the biggest) step forward of the time and really invigorated the efforts. My mother was one of the volenteers who went door to door handing out pamphlets and collecting dimes (and of course, larger contributions) to help provide vaccine services and spread the vaccine program even into the poorest areas. At the time, an army of housewives worked like that. It was a huge project and an important charity.
You don’t hear as much about the March Of Dimes anymore. They originally were dedicated to eradicating polio and since have achieved that, so now they have a new mission statement to improve all infant and early childhood health and reduce birth defects and premature birth.
The fact that their profile is lower and their mission broader is part of their being a victim of their own success (not that this is a bad thing). It is hard to explain in modern terms the kind of effort and importance that the mission to overcome polio had.
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December 6th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Nice video, but I always wondered, what exactly was the point of films like this? I mean, what did they do with them? Did they show these on television and if they did, was it something like the evening news or something? Were these in movie theaters? Before the main feature or something? It seems like it might be geared to schools, but it still seems kinda strange, thinking about how cumbersome it would be to always be showing films in a classroom, threading the film into the projector and everything.
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December 6th, 2009 at 2:29 am
That is a good question. I don’t know that schools would be able to play this kind of a film anyway. I thought that most projectors and equipment didn’t do sound, because the movie sound system was pretty complicated and they only showed silent films and movies with sound, they could play those in theaters, but it was super professional grade stuff that could do the sound pictures. I doubt a school would have that stuff.
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December 6th, 2009 at 4:24 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
That’s exactly how it was done. Every school had at least one if not more 16mm projectors, classrooms had blackout curtains and pull down screens in the front of the class. Being able to operate one of these machines was a skill all teachers had in those days, and yes the movies all had sound, and some projectors had wide-screen lenses.
Movies were a regular feature in the classroom, and there were big central libraries maintained by school-boards.
We also had filmstrips that were linked to a tape recorder such that the film would be advanced in time with the narration – something like a PowerPoint type of presentation.
Most high schools had its A/V department with at least one full time employee, and a squad of student volunteers.
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December 6th, 2009 at 4:28 am
Oh yes, and the point of these types of films was indoctrination. We were fed a lot of propaganda in the schools in those days, and there were always a few times every year that I recall being marched into the auditorium to spend an hour watching a set of government mandated short films like the one featured.
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December 6th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
DV82XL said:
I’ve seen a lot of the films in the Prelinger Archive and elsewhere and there are obviously some which are political propaganda, like anti-communist stuff, for example or ones that come down to being little more than social engineering attempts. (Not that the anti-communism propaganda actually lies or anything, as in most cases, they didn’t need to)
To say it was indoctronation seems to sell it a little short, IMHO. Of the films I’ve seen, quite a few were really excellent when it came to topics of science. A little dated, yes, but many were made by the NSF, NASA, the Atomic Energy Agency and even by the Department of Defense and had very good information and footage (today, the footage is not just good, it’s historically priceless) of radar installations, the Shippingport Reactor, early computers, biological laboratories.
There were some films made in the 1950’s on quackery which are amazingly relevant today. You could remake the exact same film and just change the clothing styles and replace a few dated lines like “gee whiz, that sounds swell” and it would be a perfect film for today. One of them was a film about people convinced that they could stay healthy from a doctor who told them that they only had to “live naturally” and get their nutrition and medical needs from some detoxifying herbal tea blends he sold. Sound familiar? That one is a message I’d love to see our schools still put out to students!
I’d put this one on the list of quality science films. Yes, it has some level of propaganda and pushes a very positive view of Pfizer, but it’s really a great look inside the laboratories and production process.
When I look at many of these films, I’m less surprised at just how good the science was in some cases with topics that we have been lead to believe are more “modern” things that only have developed a full understanding recently. I also like how hands-on they usually portray science and show the practical applications.
I realize that there’s a fine line to walk when it comes to promoting and persuading students to views that the government mandates, but in the case of the above film, I don’t see any reason why there should not be an active effort to promote the use of vaccines and the appreciation of their effectiveness.
By the way: Audio visual material is still common in the classroom (or was when I was in school) but films have been replaced by video tape and the simplicity of video has meant that the schools no longer need a dedicated A/V department. Usually the TV’s and VCR’s are on movable carts that a teacher can have for the day or more from the library or some other central location. The usability of video tape made it possible for teachers to bring in their own material that they recorded off of tv or something if they wanted.
When I graduated from the public schools, DVD’s were still a high end technology and VHS was the primary means of playing videos. I don’t recall any DVD players in my school, but that may be different now. One thing I do remember is that in the early 1990’s, my middle school science department invested in quite a bit of material on laser disc and the players. For the time, it was great, because you could skip to scenes and freeze-frame things like microscope slides and such. Of course, it would not be long before that became an obsolete footnote of technology.
Film strips (at least when I was in school) are still in use, but I doubt they make new ones. They had a lot left over from the 1980’s or earlier.
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December 7th, 2009 at 12:21 am
drbuzz0 said:
The word is a bit pejorative perhaps, but that was the times, and yes much of what was being pushed at us was probably for our own good.
With so many media outlets these days, all competing for eyeballs it is hard to realize that there was a time when informing the public was taken very seriously by governments. They had seen how propaganda had been used by all sides in WWII, and understood just how powerful a tool they had at hand.
Yes, most of it was good and the rest harmless, but do not for a moment thing it wasn’t calculated to sway public opinion. The subtext of the piece at hand here, is how we can all trust the big corporations, because they have our best interests in mind. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed agitprop theater to qualify as propaganda.
This has no impact today because we have all been desensitized by by the continual flood of information, and more importantly advertising, that we have been exposed to. It takes much more effort to sway the public now.
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December 7th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Well, part of my point is that a lot of this stuff does have value in its own right. The producers of it clearly use the opportunity to convey their own message, and many of these seemed to have been sponsored by various companies and trade groups and they drop their own self-serving spin whenever they can.
That does not take away from the fact that the information and footage in it is not complete BS. For example, I’ve seen a lot from Bell Labs which are really excellent scientific documentaries in their own right. Yes, they’re peppered with the obligatory “From the hard working people of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company” and mentions of “these fine Western Electric products.” Yet despite those plugs, it shows some great stuff about the developments at Bell Labs in the 1950’s.
But you get that from any promotional material or trade group even today. If anything, I think it was a little less of a concern then, because the message is so obvious and transparent. I don’t see how anyone could not be aware that they were getting an advertisement thrown in.
What strikes me as a little ironic is that if you look at many of these, it’s obvious they were mass produced and they cranked these out from a 16mm cutting room with standard issue optical printers and they probably never thought much of them at the time as being really historically significant. I really doubt that when these were made anyone gave a second thought to the fact that in 40 years they’d be considered a national treasure.
I see them as real historically priceless. It’s not even the complete edit of the film as much as the footage it contains. The fact that there was someone who took a movie camera and documented on film how the vaccine was produced in the early years or that there is film footage of the early satellite communications experiments or of the construction of various projects in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
There are some great ones on TV technology from then 1940’s. They were made by RCA and NBC and such, and obviously were designed to make them look extra rosy as companies. Still, the early television recordings they have and the demonstrations of how the first generation of transmitters worked is just amazing.
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December 7th, 2009 at 1:46 am
Oh, I’m not saying they didn’t have value – God knows I got a lot of my basic science education from them – so I agree there was much good in them. I also agree that muc of it is of high value now as historical documentation and should be saved. A whole era is showcased in this material, and it would be a tragedy if they were lost.
However, you are wrong about them being so transparent as propaganda or advertising for the audience they were intended for. People were just not that sophisticated at the time.
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December 10th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Chris said:
Dr. Jonas Salk made no money from the polio vaccine though he might have been able to make a fortune from it. Too bad he wasn’t given the Nobel Prize, he deserved it.
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