This week's hero is...
Dr. Hilary Koprowski
Dr. Hilary Koprowski
Dr. Hilary Koprowski was born on December 5, 1916, in Warsaw, Poland. He received his medical degree from Warsaw University in 1939. However, his medical career in Poland was cut short when Nazi Germany invaded that September. After the defeat of the Polish army, Dr. Koprowski fled with his parents and pregnant wife to Italy. From there they traveled to Brazil and finally, they immigrated to the United States. After settling in New York in 1944, he was finally able to continue his career in medicine. Little did he know, that he would end up making a much bigger contribution than he ever could have imagined.
Although he had already developed vaccines for Yellow Fever. His greatest contribution would be his development of vaccine to combat Polio. By the end of World War II, thousands of people across the US (mostly young children) had been diagnosed with Polio. In January of 1948, Dr. Koprowski developed this vaccine by attenuating the polio virus in brain cells of a common rat. He than macerated a number of ingredients in an ordinary kitchen blender and poured the result into a beaker. He than proved his vaccine's effect by using it on orally administered attenuated polio viruses. On February 27, 1950, Dr. Koprowski administered his vaccine to 20 children at a home for the disabled (Letchworth Village). As a result, 17 of them developed antibodies to the Polio virus (the other three were immune) with no side effects or complications.
For the next decade, Dr. Koprowski's vaccine was administered to hundreds of thousands of patients on four continents. Eventually a researcher named Albert Sabin, used it to develop a more powerful oral vaccine that eventually eradicated the disease that had caused so much misery in the 20th century. For the rest of his life Dr. Hilary Koprowski continued to research and develop vaccines and improve the medical field. He passed away on April 11, 2013, at the age of 96.
The race to eradicate Polio involved some of history's greatest minds. These people spent thousands of hours researching and looking for ways to cure the disease and save countless lives. Dr. Hilary Korpowski was one of those people. I believe that he is definitely someone to be held in high regard.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121227061242/http://www.koprowski.net/documents/29.html
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