Domesticating Poliovirus: Laboratory Monkeys and Vaccine Production, 1908-1960

• In Event: Farming for Health: Environmental Histories of Vaccine Production

Abstract

This paper will use the example of biomedical research into poliomyelitis and specifically efforts undertaken in early to mid-20th century Canada and the United States to develop a polio vaccine, to consider how such research involved a process of domestication with consequences for polioviruses and other species. As obligate intracellular parasites, viruses can reproduce only within a living host cell. To study polioviruses researchers needed to capture wild polioviruses and enable their reproduction in a laboratory setting. Before the advent of tissue cultures and freezing techniques to sustain viruses outside of a body, this meant keeping experimental bodies alive as hosts for the poliovirus. Human bodies could not be used, but the 1908 discovery that polio could infect monkeys created a significant research opportunity. Laboratories at the Rockefeller Institute, Jonas Salk’s University of Pittsburgh labs, and Connaught Medical Laboratories in Toronto, Ontario domesticated polioviruses using monkeys, and rhesus macaques in particular. This paper drawing on archival evidence of laboratory practices and published scientific findings, will consider first the process of domestication: including the ecological dimensions to the commerce in monkeys that supported polio research in the first half of the twentieth century, and the developments in biomedical science and laboratory techniques that first promised to free monkeys entirely from their role in poliovirus research but ended up greatly amplifying demand for their bodies. From there, I will evaluate the consequences for scientific research into polioviruses by shaping particular research avenues; impacts on polioviruses, leading to the evolution of new strains that did not exist in the wild; and the effects on monkey and human bodies. By examining the intersection of these dynamics this paper aims to advance our understanding of how human relations with pathogens are more like than unlike human relations with other plant and animal species.

Author

• Liza Piper, University of Alberta