An Excerpt From the Show

What's This Scene All About?

In 1947, Dr. Jonas Salk came to the University of Pittsburgh to head the School of Medicine's Virus Research Laboratory. Soon after his arrival, Dr. Salk began working on a vaccine that would innoculate patients against poliovirus, which infected thousands of children each year and could lead to paralysis and death. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was diganosed with poliovirus at the age of 39, and his National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes) invested heavily in Dr. Salk's work.

In 1954, Dr. Salk released a polio vaccine for clinical trials, which were wildly successful. In 1955, the vaccine was licensed and quickly implemented across the United States and the globe.

This excerpt from the 1956 performance of Scope and Scalpel includes a song from the show's first act, "The Whole World Is Talking About the Salk Boy." In this scene, a rhesus monkey sings that he is more deserving of accolades than Dr. Salk, since the monkey was used to develop and test the vaccine. The song also includes some other historical references about the vaccine's development, including a reference to the "Mahoney strain," one of the three subtypes of poliovirus. Other scientists are also mentioned, including Dr. Sabin, a Russian-born researcher who emigrated to the United States during his teen years. He developed a live-virus, oral polio vaccine at the same time that Salk developed the killed-virus, injectable polio vaccine. While Salk's vaccine became popular in the United States, Sabin's was widely used elsewhere in the world. Finally, the song also calls out Dr. Enders, who collaborated with Dr. Salk on the vaccine developed at the University of Pittsburgh. Interestingly, Enders and other collaborators won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for culturing poliovirus in the laboratory, while Salk never won the prize.

The Show's Playbill

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