User:Breahmckay/Bernice Eddy

Cutter Incident
In 1954 the NIH asked Eddy to perform safety tests for a batch of inactivated polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk for Cutter Laboratories. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine that was to be used in a massive national vaccination program. Eddy's job was to test the inactivated vaccines from five different companies. After testing the vaccines on 18 monkeys, she and her team discovered that Cutter Laboratories' vaccine contained residual live poliovirus, resulting in the monkeys showing polio-like symptoms and paralysis. Eddy found that three of the six batches paralyzed monkeys and therefore contained live polio virus. These findings pointed to a flawed vaccine manufacturing process at Cutter Laboratories. Eddy reported her findings to William Workman, head of the Laboratory of Biologics Control. Workman did not heed Eddy's warnings, and she was taken off of polio research in response. Her findings were never given to the vaccine licensing advisory committee.

The flawed vaccine manufacturing process produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. The exposures led to an epidemic of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in a further 113 people paralyzed and 5 deaths. On April 29 1955 NIH director William Sebrell chaired a meeting to examine Cutter's manufacturing protocols. The meeting was also attended by Eddy and produced no conclusion on what Cutter should do differently in its manufacturing process.

On May 6 1955, NIH Associate Director Leonard A. Scheele announced to the press that the national polio vaccination program would be postponed until further notice. Vaccine manufacturers withheld 3.9 million doses of polio vaccine as a result, and the polio vaccine program suspension in the United States was followed by a suspension of similar polio vaccination drives in Great Britain, Sweden, West Germany and South Africa. The Cutter Incident was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in US history, and exposed several thousand children to live polio virus on vaccination. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby stepped down. Sebrell, the director of the NIH, resigned.

Polyomavirus research
While testing common cold vaccines, Eddy and her NIH colleague Sarah Elizabeth Stewart began research on a virus that Stewart had discovered. Building on earlier work by Ludwik Gross, Stewart and Bernice E. Eddy were the first to describe a polyomavirus. They did so by injecting the mice with ground organs of other mice that were known to contain leukemia, and observing cancerous tumor growth that was unrelated to leukemia. They satisfied Koch's postulates to demonstrate that polyomavirus can cause cancer to be transmitted from animal to animal. Stewart and Eddy continued to test the theory that viral components are able to induce tumors. They tested tumor extracts from both monkey and mouse embryos, and found that the mouse embryos contained a higher quantity of cancer causing viral agents, thus leading them to reason that viruses can be causative agents of cancer. They also concluded that the polyomavirus was able to cause 20 different types of mouse tumors. Some of the tumors observed were angiomatous sarcomas in Syrian hamsters, sarcomas in rats, and mesenchymal nodules in rabbits. The virus was named the Stewart-Eddy or SE polyoma virus, after their respective surnames. Their collaborative efforts earned them recognition by Time magazine in 1959, featuring a cover story on newly discovered viral agents that cause cancer.

Ludwik Gross rivalry
Ludwik Gross and Sarah Stewart had been researching cancer-causing viruses concurrently and separately, and had been aware of each other's work since at least December 1952. Both had independently discovered parotid tumors around the same time, and each reprimanded the other for not citing each other's work. When Stewart and Eddy, along with Borgese, published their 1958 paper on a parotid tumor-inducing virus (later named the SE polyomavirus), Gross' earlier work on the parotid virus was not cited. The rivalry came to a peak in 1958, when Jacob Furth attributed the discovery of the parotid tumor virus to both Stewart and Gross. While Gross claimed to be the first discoverer of the virus, Stewart maintained that she and Eddy discovered it independently. When the virus was renamed "SE polyomavirus" for Stewart and Eddy, Gross felt that this diminished his role in the discovery, and he wrote several letters to his peers arguing his point. Later, Eddy would agree, going on to state that, "Sarah was very aggressive. We named it. We probably shouldn't have," and "He (Gross) had that virus before we did. There was no question."