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There Peebles and other research fellows worked with infinite patience for two years, domesticating the virus. After 72 generations, the measles virus was adjudged sufficiently attenuated for safe trial in children. Dr. Samuel Katz, now No. 2 man in Enders' lab, gave some of the first shots to his own youngsters.
Last week's symposium reports made it clear that Enders' measles vaccine is effective in stimulating production of antibodies that should give permanent immunity. But in many children the vaccine causes something like a mild case of measles. A few youngsters get the rash, but more get a fever that may run as high as 104° or 106°. Strangely, this fever does not make the youngsters ill, and few of them need even to stay in bed. Doctors generally agree with Virologist Enders: if the facts about the dangers of natural measles are fully explained, parents will accept these side effects of vaccination without too much fuss. To be on the safe side, some physicians are giving, along with the vaccine, a shot of gamma globulin, hoping that it contains enough measles antibodies to cut down the rash and fever. But this may also curtail the immunity. Some manufacturers are preparing a killed-virus measles vaccine.
But usable vaccines are hardly the whole measure of the Enders team's technical breakthrough in tissue-culture methods, now 13 years old. When the method was devised, only 13 viruses that cause disease in man had been identified. Now at least 58 others have been cultured, plus about 300 that infect animals, most of them grown by Enders' methods. They range from a score or more of common cold viruses to more severe respiratory diseases (including some types of viral pneumonia). They include respiratory-intestinal infections, and apparently even infectious hepatitis.
The Cancer Challenge. The big prize in the pursuit of viruses is cancer. When Peyton Rous, 50 years ago, reported his chicken-sarcoma virus, he was scoffed at because it implied that a cancer (at least in fowl) was infectious, and every medical scientist of a half-century ago "knew" that cancer was not an infectious disease. Today, though none of them believe that cancer is infectious in the same way as measles, polio or flu, thousands of researchers are working feverishly in response to the challenge thrown down in 1956 by Wendell Stanley: if animal cancers are caused in some way by viruses, why not human cancers? Prove it or disprove it!