How A Pittsburgh-Made Polio Vaccine Helped Beat A Disease That Terrified A Nation (Podcast)

“The Fifth Avenue lab where he and the original five-person team worked was located below a ward of polio patients who couldn’t breathe on their own. Machines, ‘iron lungs’ did it for them, said Youngner. ‘They had these machines that drove the in and out of breathing,’ he said. ‘I mean it just kept them alive.’

The ward was enormously loud. The machines created a terrible din and drove home the reality of the disease, Youngner said. ‘We had motivation right there in the building,’ he said. ‘Everybody was very serious about what we were doing. I never worked so hard in my life. I worked seven days a week’.”

90.5 WESA | By Margaret J. Krauss

When Dr. Julius Youngner moved to Pittsburgh in 1949, he thought he’d be in the city for two years. Though a commissioned officer in the Public Health Service at the Cancer Institute, he wanted to work on viruses and took a position in a University of Pittsburgh lab directed by Dr. Jonas E. Salk, developing a vaccine for polio, said Youngner.

“And the rest is history,” he said from his Squirrel Hill living room, 66 years later.

The Fifth Avenue lab where he and the original five-person team worked was located below a ward of polio patients who couldn’t breathe on their own. Machines, “iron lungs” did it for them, said Youngner.

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