Another Step Foward

Like many another physician, small, bright-eyed Dr. Frank Gollan has an incurable interest in a disease that he himself has suffered from. At the age of three in Czechoslovakia, where he was born 38 years ago, Dr. Gollan had an attack of infantile paralysis. He survived uncrippled. Until he was 17, he planned to be a concert pianist, but a doctor-uncle attracted him to medicine. He escaped from Czechoslovakia just ahead of the Nazis in 1938: his parents died in Auschwitz gas chambers.

In the U.S. Dr. Gollan practiced as a pediatrician, did research work on high blood pressure, made malnutrition studies of Italian children for UNRRA. In 1946 he went to the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he is now assistant professor of physiology.

But his interest in his own disease was still strong; he carried on polio research as "a hobby." Last week he reported to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine the results of his hobby: he has isolated a polio virus 99.96% pure. Best previous results: a virus 80 to 95% pure, isolated at Stanford University a year ago (TIME, Jan. 20, 1947).

Dr. Gollan's work, said Dr. Maurice B. Visscher, head of Minnesota's department of physiology, makes the possibility of an anti-polio vaccine "very much greater than ever." But a lot of work remains to be done.

The important thing about Dr. Gollan's experiment: his method, although not startlingly new, proves that a virus can be produced rapidly and cheaply. He took brain tissue from polio-infected mice, chopped it up, put it in an alcohol solution, then precipitated the virus by spinning it in an ordinary laboratory centrifuge. He worked with MM (mouse-monkey) virus, which does not affect human beings; but his method, he believes, can be used to isolate viruses that attack humans. When that is done, researchers can begin work on a vaccine.

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