The use of Volunteers in Medical Virology
Knight, V.
Progress in Medical Virology. Fortschritte der Medizinischen Virusforschung. Progres en Virologie Medicale 6: 1-26
1964
ISSN/ISBN: 0079-645X PMID: 14310573 Document Number: 10050
This report has described examples of the benefits to mankind of the use of volunteers in medical virology. Man seems naturally inclined to experiment upon himself. One such successful experiment often inspired others. Thus, FINLAY commented on the example of smallpox vaccination as he attempted, in 1881, to transmit yellow fever from man to man by mosquitos for the purpose of inducing immunity. His work inspired the successful transmission experiments of REED in 1900. The later important development of yellow fever vaccines by the Rockefeller Yellow Fever Commissions and French workers in Dakar was also based on observations in human subjects. After the first common cold studies in 1914 there was little further done until a brief period of activity after World War I. This later work was interrupted by the discovery of influenza virus type A in 1933, which touched off a world-wide burst of investigations, many of them utilizing volunteers, which resulted in the development of a useful influenza vaccine. World War II brought a new interest in respiratory viral disease, and the transmission experiments of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board provided important impetus to this work. The English studies of common colds in volunteers at Salisbury, beginning just after the war and continuing to the present, the field studies of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the later unique approach of JACKSON et al. to these problems at the University of Illinois, all contributed significantly to a rapidly expanding field. Much of the basis for the establishment of the program at the Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health in 1961 was provided by these earlier studies. Details of the NIH program, including recruitment of volunteers, isolation and control procedures, safety-testing of inocula, medical care, control of the use of volunteers, and results of inoculation of more than 800 volunteers with more than 20 different respiratory viral agents and the PPLO, M. pneumoniae, were described.
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