Medicine: Renewed Attack on Polio

As a blizzard swept over the peak of Vermont's Mount Mansfield one day last week, a woman in a wheelchair pulled the veil from a two-ton marble sculpture fashioned like a huge dime. With the dedication of the mountaintop sculpture, a monument to the victims of the U.S.'s first polio epidemic,* the 1956 March of Dimes opened. There was the usual fanfare—the sort that has made Americans contribute more than three billion dimes since the drive began in 1938. But the 1956 kickoff was different: for the first time, the year was beginning with the certain knowledge that polio is on...