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Polio presented the center with successive challenges. After the 1916 epidemic (worst in U.S. history), the center's orthopedic surgeons made striking advances in correcting the deformities left by paralysis. The hospital's close association with Harvard, begun at the turn of the century, paid a big dividend in 1928 when Professor Philip Drinker offered the doctors a respirator he had devised for polio patients: it has since become universally used and famous as the iron lung. Twenty years later, Harvard Virologist John F. Enders, a member of the center's research staff, published an obscurely worded paper describing a method of growing polio virus in tissue cultures. On that foundation, the Salk vaccine was built, and for that work. Enders (with Thomas H. Weller and Frederick C. Robbins) won Nobel Prize.
Even more retiring than Enders is Robert Gross, surgeon, who in 1938 performed the first successful operation to correct an open arterial duct near the heart, which in normal children closes automatically soon after birth. Until Dr. Cross's discovery, the defect had usually proved fatal to a child within a few years. Since then, with a combination of daring and precise skill, Dr. Gross has made several additions to the growing list of techniques for operating on the aorta and inside the beating human heart, notably improvements in arterial grafts and methods of "banking" pieces of artery.
Four-Button Man. At the head of the hospital's wide-ranging research is Dr. Sidney Farber, a pathologist by first choice, now one of the world's outstanding authorities on the chemical treatment of leukemia and related cancers in children. Sartorially so conservative that he is known to colleagues as "Four-Button Sid." Dr. Farber has pioneered in the revolutionary treatment of these diseases with nitrogenmustard derivatives and folic acid antagonists. So far, no child victim of acute leukemia has been cured. But once all were doomed to die within a few months of onset of the disease; now many live for years in apparently normal health until they become resistant to the entire battery of drugs.
These children, all under sentence of death, give the Children's Medical Center staff their severest pangs. Says Dr. Farber: "I've been here since 1927, and they don't get any easier to take. We couldn't take it at all if it weren't that we have 200 people here doing research that may some day find the answer to it." Researchers at the center have the fullest freedom in their basic research. Those working on cancer are specifically chartered to investigate anything pertaining to growth—a charter which includes the whole animate world. Says Farber: "This place is heaven for doctors and scientists."
It is not yet a heaven for children, although everything possible is done with toy trains, dolls and gay murals to make them feel at home. Some distant day, the researchers hope to work themselves out of jobs as they achieve (or help in) the conquest of one disease after another. Already there are two clinics where mothers take well children to make sure of keeping them well. "Eventually," says Dr. Farber, "this should become an institute of child care for the development and perpetuation of the normal."