http://www.whale.to/v/eddy.html



In 1954 Eddy was fifty-one years old. Born in a mining town in West
Virginia, she got a Ph.D. in 1927 from the University of Cincinnati and came
to Washington during the Great Depression to work at the Hygienic
Laboratory, as she continued to call it. Her job from then until she retired
in 1973 was the safety testing of vaccines.
In 1954 the rush was on. Her lab had gotten samples of the inactivated
polio vaccine to certify on a "due-yesterday" basis. "This was a product
that had never been made before and they were going to use it right away,"
she recalled. She and her staff worked around the clock. "We had eighteen
monkeys. We inoculated these eighteen monkeys with each vaccine that came
in. And we started getting paralyzed monkeys." She reported to her superiors
that the lots were Cutter's, and sent pictures of the paralyzed monkeys
along as well. "They were going to be injecting this thing into children."
William Sebrell, the director of the NIH, stopped by the animal house
where they were working, not to thank her for blowing the whistle but to ask
if she and her co-workers wanted their children immunized with the vaccine,
as it was in short supply. "I thanked him but said that my children had
escaped polio so far and that I preferred to wait until the testing program
was over before having them immunized," said Eddy. "Everyone there turned
down the offer."
She heard nothing more about her report and never got the photographs
back. "They went ahead and released the vaccine anyway, a lot of it. The
monkeys they just disregarded." [Book extract. The Health Century] Dr.
Bernice E. Eddy, whose lab tests found that the Cutter vaccine had been
improperly inactivated.