Miami Hurricane, August 21, 1953

              Sanders Heads UM Polio Study;
Directs Microbiology Research Lab T H E M I A M I
DR. MURRAY SANDERS
Dr. Murray Sanders, nationally known bacteriologist, virologist and head of the research team which released a scientific report on their progress in blocking polio in monkeys, came to the University in 1949.
Currently, Dr. Sanders is direr-	;
tor of the UM microbiology re- | search laboratory located on South campus. His associate members of the research team are Dr. Manuel E. Gonzalez-Soret and Benjamin A. Akin.
During World War II, Dr. Sanders served as division chief of the biological warfare project of the chemical warfare service. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services in the capacities of consultant to the Secretary of War, special officer to the division of preventative medicine of the Surgeon General’s office and member of the Scientific Intelligence commission.
Before coming to the UM, the scientist held an associate professorship in bacteriology at Columbia and was consultant in pathology for Harlem hospital in New York.
Dr. Sanders is well known in the fields of bacteriology and virology through his previous work with dar-visul, the first drug to show any effect on a virus.	•
The scientist holds a B.S. degree from Tufts college and he obtained his M.D. from Rush medical college of the University of Chicago. He was also a scholarship student at the University of Chicago department of anatomy and at Heidelberg university.
The two associates working along with Dr. Sanders are Manuel E.
Gonzalez-Soret and Benjamin Akin.
Soret is a research associate professor of veterinary science and came to the UM in 1949. He received his D.V.M. degree in 1939 from the University of Havana.
Akin, a research associate of microbiology, studied at the Long Island College of Medicine and came to the UM in 1951.
HURRIC
Volume XXVII University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla., Aucust 21, 1953
No. 34
UM Team Develops Poliomyelitis Toxoid After 4 Years Of Intensive Research
Cohen Named UM Controller
Morse Takes Leave To Do Nuclear Study
Dr. Jerome G. Morse, assistant professor of chemistry, is in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for a five-week session in nuclear chemical studies dealing with radioactive isotopes.
There will be a reactivation of the South campus laboratory formerly devoted to radioactive isotopes.
This laboratory was formerly operated by Dr. Alfred P. Mills, assistant professor of chemistry now on leave. Upon his return in February, he will work with Dr. Morse on radioactive isotopic research.
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Eugene E. Cohen was named university controller yesterday by UM President Jay F. W. Pearson.
Cohen was appointed university budget officer in September 1948 and will retain that position along with the new appointment.
Cohen received his BBA and MBA from the UM and also studied at Wayne and North Carolina.
Four years of intensive research at the UM plus the work of many scientists in all parts of the world for the last 50 years preceded the official announcement that a harmless and stable toxoid, developed by a UM research team, effectively interferes with poliomyelitis virus infection in monkeys.
The discovery was presented to the Society of American Biologists, in San Francisco, last week.
Dr. Murray Sanders, research professor of microbiology, Dr. Manuel E. Gonzalez-Soret, associate professor of veterinary sciences and Benjamin A. Akin, research associate in microbiology comprised the UM research team.
“The University of Miami has patiently supported this project for four years, probably the longest period in the history of polio research without scientific publication,” Dr. Sanders said.
Dr. Jay F. W. Pearson supported the derision of the investigators to address themselves solely to scientific societies. He recalled the unauthorized and sensational reports made public two years ago by Walter Winchell.
He emphasized that raising pre-i mature hopes about a cure for polio is unfair to the public.
Dr. Sanders presented his paper to fellow scientists as an intermediate report. No claims of a treatment for polio were made. Other papers on the subject are in progress.
Bits and pieces of relevant research studies have been in the files of medical journals for half a century, the earliest in 1904 and the most recent as late as March 1953. The University researchers, proceeding
l)R. SANDERS. CENTER, AKIN, LEFT, AND GUMZALEZ-SOK&T
on their own line of experimentation, 1 of the research the toxoid proved were finally able to check their find- 1 unstable. Older material would not ings by fitting the scattered frag- produce the same effects as fresh ments into the conclusions medically material. Months of experimentation
PIPETTING SERUM IS CLAIRE HASSET, FOREGROUND, ASSISTED BY LORRAINE ROBERGE
stated in the San Francisco paper.
The UM line of attack on the problem dates from experiments of Dr. Sanders at Columbia in 1942. Inconclusive in themselves, they led to an assumption that the “interference phenomenon" might be significant in polio work. The phenomenon, familiar in other disease fields, holds that two infectious agents injected into the same animal would render both harmless.
Dr. Sanders and his colleagues pursued this inquiry for four years, first at Veterans Administration hos-pitid and later at South • campus. They studied effects on 2,000 rhesus monkeys and many thousands of mice. Pounds of cobra venom, a relatively enormous amount, were used.
The principal fact of the San Francisco paper is that the UM research team has demonstrated interfering effects up to 24 hours after monkeys were injected in the brain with the polio virus. This is expected to prove an important research weapon.
A layman's understanding of whai has been going forward on our medical doorstep is better reached if th< actual experimentation done here b< separated from the pieces ot basic research carried out on three con tinents and finally assembled for th< «•Ve of demonstrating that the orar tical work at South campus adds up.
Stated simply, the progressive steps at South campus consisted of finding a way to make the Injected cobra venom material harmless, and, secondly, the performance of endless tests on the proper injection amounts then and timing. Shelves of accumulated charts mark the four years of daily grind.
The “toxin”—cobra venom in thi case—is lethal. Its “toxoid" retain the desired properties of the venor but is rendered harmless by add' tion of certain chemicals and of copper as a binder. In the mid-career
passed before a harmless and com-I pletely stable toxoid was created.
From then on the workers were confident that achieved results would stand up. Their interest centered on documenting how the interference phenomenon takes place. Here are some of the significant clues which, put together, confirmed their practical findings:
In 1904 Drs. Lamb and Hunter in England demonstrated that cobra venom attacks the motor rails in the central nervous system, particularly in the area in the spinal cord controlling the use of the arms and legs. Each of these motor cells has a tiny projecting nerve line which joins others to form a nerve cable to a muscle. Polio kills these motor rails and the muscle atrophies.
Decades after Lamb and Hunter, a group of Johns Hopkins scientists, pursuing a piece of purely objective research, found that cutting a nerve to a muscle produces a chemical reaction in the motor cells. But, unlike the lethal effect of polio, the cells retain a diminished activity which can revive completely when the severed nerve grows together again.
Add to these links of evidence tire fact that during the above process two specific enzymes in the cell are depressed in activity and that during that stage the entire cell is resistant to polio.
Then arises the problem of finding a substance which can decrease this activity of the two enzymes without otherwise harming the motor cell structure.
Last March two researchers in Great Britain, Briganca and Quastel, reported that cobra venom which had been heated at 100 degrees centigrade for 15 minutes depresses the activity of the two key enzymes.
Stated in medical terms to the biologists at San Francisco, the UM research paper is a guide which its authors have offered for further study in one of medicine's most important fields of inquiry.