The full comment by Denise Whatley on Rivalry (April 2015):
My first thought on the polio commentary is, “Hindsight is 20/20”. Would Sabin agree that we should have started experiments on humans and that fewer humans would have been negatively impacted? Would we even have a vaccine (especially today)? He had the benefit of failures to try a new approach and to reinvestigate ignored findings (that were likely ignored for a reason – albeit the wrong one). The questions are clearly rhetorical but it seems the more we learn the more questions we have and I am not sure how we get answers without live experiments prior to actually using humans (most of us would object to the prisoners as experiment subjects used/tried at some points in history – possibly still current in some places. Current limits on terminally ill – with consent – may be over restrictive ) . The organs on a chip and growing human cultures seem to be the most promising for controlling pathogens NOW but technology is JUST approaching that threshold and it will likely be my grandchildren that see the benefit.
I am not sure you CAN separate biological curiosity from medical successes. The research is often very different with the scientist researching a problem taking from the findings of the scientists trying to find out how it all works. Even in the misdirection for the polio vaccine, Sabin is quoted as having found 30 year old research that placed him on another path – i.e. he did NOT find the polio in the gut, he found other’s research that displayed the location and the original researchers were not the scientists to work on a solution.
Perhaps I am overly sensitive to the “mad scientist” label or naive to unproductive cruel research but the quality life extending results are quite evident for those of us living in first world countries.