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Interferon is not a specific antiviral defense. Dr. Isaacs believes, but one of the body's general defenses. Just what it is or how it works, nobody knows. But the search is being pressed in many labs, including Enders'. Last week Enders told the Washington measles conference that he and a research fellow have just found evidence suggesting that interferon is important in changing a dangerous virus like that of wild measles to the tame Edmonston strain useful for vaccines. In such ways, the findings of many far-flung laboratories fit together, building largely on the Enders cultures that exposed so many viruses to isolation and attack. Once a starveling science that at any given time occupied only a few dozen men, virology has thus fanned out to become the task of thousands moving massively against man's diseases and toward life's most elusive secrets.
* The mountain from which Moses viewed the Promised Land in Deuteronomy 34:1.
* The feat of growing living tissues outside the body, in a bath of blood fractions or chemical nutrients, was first achieved by Dr. Ross G. Harrison (1870-1959) at Johns Hopkins University in 1907. Alexis Carrel later publicized it. Many scientists, among them Enders, believe that Harrison rated a Nobel Prize for his work.
* Including Britain's Sir Christopher Andrewes. Australia's Sir Macfarlane Burnet. Russia's Viktor M. Zhdanov.