Dripping Life

Texas was hardest hit by the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and early ’50s. As scientists raced to find a vaccine, local officials, celebrities and ordinary people came together to raise funding for the desperately-needed research.

Polio (poliomyelitis) was a hand-to-mouth disease, the virus transferred from unwashed hands or contaminated objects put into little mouths. In the 1940s, this monstrous disease struck almost every summer.

In that decade — before, during and after World War II — every parent and child feared polio. It was relentless, randomly attacking male and female, black and white, from rural communities to suburbia. Much like COVID-19, no one understood the virus or why some victims suffered only mild symptoms while others experienced permanent deformity, weeks or a lifetime in the fearsome iron lung…or death.

Like COVID-19, most people knew few facts about polio: it was highly contagious, would strike without warning, preferred children and young adult bodies and there was no preventative, no cure.

Between 1942 and 1955, major outbreaks occurred every year in the state, claiming thousands of victims, from Amarillo to the Rio Grande Valley and points east and west.

The random nature of polio kept everyone bound in fear. The disease could strike one individual in a neighborhood or paralyze several. One child could experience a mild case while a playmate became paralyzed and required an iron lung.

Each surge of the crippling disease was met with helpless confusion. With no way to prevent or cure it, Texas communities grasped at any means to protect their youngsters. Churches canceled services. Swimming pools closed. Theater marquees went dark. Airplanes spread DDT from North Texas to Galveston Bay. Newspapers issued daily tallies of polio cases, complete with the victims’ names and addresses.

Unknown to many, a team of four brilliant scientists were hard at work in an obscure lab at the University of Pittsburg. One of them — Major Byron Bennett, the chief technician on the Salk team — was from the little town of Vernon, Texas. Salk and Bennett started the same day in October 1947 and shared a small, one-room office.

Eventually, junior researchers Julius Youngner and L. James Lewis and secretary Lorraine Friedman were hired. Six weeks later, a deliveryman arrived with six monkeys, which the scientists used to study influenza. Before the vaccine was perfected, 15,000 monkeys had been part of the vaccine development.

Unknown to the 1.6 million second graders from across the country who were loaded into school buses, for a series of three injections, they — all 25,000 of them — would become part of the largest clinical trial ever attempted. They called them “Polio Pioneers.” This trial proved the efficacy of injecting dead virus to prevent development of the full-blown disease…and yes, there were risks.

Analysis of the collected data from that gigantic clinical trial found the new vaccine did, indeed, protect the children from the onslaught of the epidemic. A press conference was held in January 1953, and Dr. Salk, flanked by the three members of his research team, announced he had found a promising anti-polio vaccine. Salk did not introduce his collaborators.

His team, totally surprised Salk had taken all the bows and had usurped all credit for the vaccine, was devastated.

In a letter to his mother, Major Bennett wrote: “Dear Mama, you have probably heard about Dr. Jonas E. Salk and his co-workers’ producing a polio vaccine. I am one of the three co-workers— and we are disappointed about not being mentioned by name.”

Bennett, a brilliant scientist in his own right, had spent seven years collaborating with Salk and the two other scientists. But imagine his disappointment. Salk had many other opportunities to share the limelight, but he never credited his team. Bennett, the first scientist to join Salk, spent seven years, correlating and analyzing data, helping perfect the vaccine.

A Pittsburgh Press article said Bennett “played a leading role” in the development of the vaccine. Working six and seven days a week in the lab, this Texas scientist processed blood and tissue samples from the animals and logged the data before it was analyzed.

His final job was to ensure when the vaccine was prepared, the virus included in it was properly bathed in formaldehyde. He had to verify the virus was actually dead before the vaccine was injected into the monkeys and, eventually, the thousands of kids in the clinical trial.

Born in Hopewell, just northwest of Paris, Texas, in 1907, Byron L. Bennett joined the Navy when he was a junior at Mount Vernon High School. After graduation, he started his unconventional scientific career as a technician at a military medical laboratory in New England.

In 1928, he left the Navy and enrolled at Harvard University with the intent to study medicine. Instead, he joined a Harvard medical expedition in Mexico. One expedition turned into nine. He worked in Guatemala, Peru, and the Congo as an all-around technician in the battle against Oroya fever, a blood infection, and onchocerciasis, a flyborne disease that blinds victims.

On December 7, 1941 on the heels of Pearl Harbor, Bennett enlisted in the Army Medical Service Corps. His role in the Sanitary Corps in Italy and Egypt was to control the typhoid fever outbreaks, hampering the staging of American and Allied troops. Through field studies, Bennett determined locals had been using the same needle up to seven times when giving vaccinations. Bennett earned a medal for his work against the disease.

By 1958, five years after Salk’s initial announcement, more than 3 billion kids had been inoculated with Salk vaccine, his three nameless collaborators had all but faded into history. By 1979, polio had been eradicated almost worldwide. Jonas Salk enjoyed “rock star” status but the three other contributing scientists remained unknown, and in June 1957, Major Byron Bennett entered into the obscurity of eternity when he put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He was 49.