Hilary Koprowski

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Hilary Koprowski
Born(1916-12-05)5 December 1916
Warsaw, Government General of Warsaw
Died11 April 2013(2013-04-11) (aged 96)
Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, U.S.
NationalityPolish
CitizenshipPoland, United States
Known forPolio vaccine
SpouseIrena Koprowska (m. 1938)
Children2
AwardsAlbert B. Sabin Gold Medal (2007)
Scientific career
FieldsVirology

Hilary Koprowski (5 December 1916 – 11 April 2013) was a

scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals
.

Koprowski received many academic honors and national decorations, including the Belgian

Order of Merit and Legion of Honour, Finland's Order of the Lion, and the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
.

Koprowski was the target of accusations in the press related to the "

human immunodeficiency virus was introduced to humans before his polio-vaccine trials were conducted in Africa.[1] The case was settled out of court with a formal apology from Rolling Stone magazine.[2]

Life

Hilary Koprowski was born in Warsaw to an educated, assimilated Jewish family.

Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He adopted scientific research as his life's work, but never gave up music and composed several musical works. In July 1938, while in medical school, Koprowski married Irena Grasberg.[8]

In

Santa Cecilia Conservatory; while Irena went to France, where she gave birth to their first child, Claude Koprowski, and worked as an attending physician at a psychiatric hospital.[9]

As the invasion of France loomed in 1940, Irena and the infant escaped from France via Spain and Portugal —where the Koprowski family reunited — to

oral polio vaccine. Koprowski served as director of the Wistar Institute, 1957–91, during which period Wistar achieved international recognition for its vaccine research and became a National Cancer Institute Cancer Center.[citation needed
]

Koprowski, 2007

Koprowski died on April 11, 2013, aged 96,

Bala Cynwyd
, Pennsylvania.

Hilary Koprowski and his late wife had two sons. Their first child Claude (born in Paris, 1940), who died in 2020, was a retired physician.[13] Their second son, Christopher (born 1951) is a retired physician certified in two specialties, neurology and radio-oncology. He is also the former chair of the department of radiation oncology at Christiana Hospital in Delaware.[14]

Polio vaccine

While at

polio virus. In researching a potential polio vaccine, he had focused on live viruses that were attenuated (rendered non-virulent) rather than on killed viruses (the latter became the basis for the injected vaccine subsequently developed by Jonas Salk
).

Koprowski viewed the live vaccine as more powerful, since it entered the intestinal tract directly and could provide lifelong immunity, whereas the Salk vaccine required booster shots. Also, administering a vaccine by mouth is easy, whereas an injection requires medical facilities and is more expensive.[15]

Koprowski developed his polio vaccine by attenuating the virus in brain cells of a

Sigmodon hispidus, a New World species that is susceptible to polio.[10] He administered the vaccine to himself in January 1948 and, on 27 February 1950, to 20 children at Letchworth Village, a home for disabled persons in Rockland County, New York
. Seventeen of the 20 children developed antibodies to polio virus — the other three apparently already had antibodies — and none of the children developed complications. Within 10 years, the vaccine was being used on four continents.

Albert Sabin's early work with attenuated-live-virus polio vaccine was developed from attenuated polio virus that Sabin had received from Koprowski.

Rabies vaccine

In addition to his work on the polio vaccine, Koprowski (along with Stanley Plotkin and Tadeusz Wiktor) did significant work on an improved vaccine against rabies.[11] The group developed the HDCV rabies vaccine in the 1960s at the Wistar Institute. It was licensed for use in the United States in 1980.[16]

Affiliations

Koprowski was president of Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories, Inc, and head of the Center for Neurovirology at Thomas Jefferson University. In 2006 he was awarded a record 50th grant from the National Institutes of Health. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals. He served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

Honors and legacy

Koprowski received many honorary degrees, academic honors, and national decorations, including the

Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. In 1989 he received the San Marino Award for Medicine and the Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences
in Warsaw.

Koprowski received numerous honors in

John Scott Award and, in May 1990, the most prestigious honor of his home city, the Philadelphia Award. He was a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
, which in 1959 presented him with its Alvarenga Prize.

Koprowski was a member of the

Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters
.

On June 3, 1983, Koprowski received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine at Uppsala University, Sweden.[18]

On 22 March 1995, Koprowski was made a Commander of

Legion d'Honneur from the French government. On 29 September 1998 he was presented by Poland's president with the Grand Cross of Poland's Order of Merit
.

On 25 February 2000 Koprowski was honored with a reception at

Pennsylvania Senate, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge
.

On 13 September 2004, Koprowski was presented with the Pioneer in NeuroVirology Award by the

Baltimore, Maryland.[19]

In 2014 Drexel University established the Hilary Koprowski Prize in Neurovirology in honor of Dr. Koprowski's contributions to the field of neurovirology. The prize is awarded annually in conjunction with the International Symposium on Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease, which is sponsored by the Institute for Molecular Medicine and Infectious Disease (IMMID) within the Drexel University College of Medicine. During the Symposium, the prize recipient is asked to deliver an honorary lecture.

AIDS conspiracy theory

Main article: Oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis

British journalist

AIDS
.

The OPV AIDS hypothesis has, however, been rejected within much of the medical community and is contradicted by at least one article in the journal

HIV-1 group M virus originated in Africa 30 years before the OPV trials were conducted.[1] The journal Science refuted Hooper's claims, writing: "[I]t can be stated with almost complete certainty that the large polio vaccine trial... was not the origin of AIDS."[20]

Koprowski rejected the claim, based on his own analysis. In a separate court case, he won a regretful clarification,[21] and a symbolic award of $1 in damages,[22] in a defamation suit against Rolling Stone, which had published an article repeating similar false allegations.[23] A concurrent defamation lawsuit that Koprowski brought against the Associated Press was settled several years later; the settlement's terms were not publicly disclosed.[22]

Koprowski's original reports from 1960 to 1961 detailing part of his vaccination campaign in the Belgian Congo are available online from the World Health Organization.[24][25][26]

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    S2CID 4418410
    . Note 1,13: Korber, B.et al. Science 288, 1789–1796 (2000)
  2. PMID 12930866
    .
  3. ^ Profile, Whatisbiotechnology.org; accessed 21 April 2015.
  4. ^ Dr Hilary Koprowski: Virologist who developed the first oral vaccine against polio, independent.co.uk; accessed 21 April 2015.
  5. ^ The Pawel Koprowski Memorial Vacation Award was founded by Hilary Koprowski in 1958 in honor of his father.
  6. ^ The Koprowski and Berland Genealogy, ancestry.com; accessed 21 April 2015.
  7. ^ Mémoires of Judith Yazvina (2004)
  8. ^ Biography, U.S. National Library of Medicine website; accessed 21 April 2015.
  9. ISBN 9780791431771
    .
  10. ^ a b c Hilary Koprowski, Who Developed First Live-Virus Polio Vaccine, Dies at 96 - The New York Times, April 20, 2013.
  11. ^ a b Plotkin, S.A., "In Memoriam: Hilary Koprowski, 1916–2013", J. Virol., August 2013 vol. 87 no. 15, pp. 8270-8271. doi: 10.1128/JVI.01449-13. Accessed 24 May 2017.
  12. ^ Hilary Koprowski, polio vaccine pioneer, dead at 96, philly.com, April 13, 2013.
  13. ^ "Claude Koprowski Obituary". 22 October 2020.
  14. ^ "Nutrition Outreach Programs". Archived from the original on 2010-06-13. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
  15. PMID 29624470
    .
  16. ^ "Rabies Vaccine 2" Archived 2020-07-11 at the Wayback Machine, History of Vaccines, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (2017). Accessed 24 May 2017.
  17. ^ Directory [of] PIASA Members, p. 25.
  18. ^ "Honorary doctorates - Uppsala University, Sweden".
  19. ^ Award Ceremony and speeches Archived 2008-10-02 at the Wayback Machine
  20. PMID 1439779
    .
  21. ^ "Origin of AIDS" update: Clarification Archived 2008-08-05 at the Wayback Machine, uow.edu.au, 9 December 1993, p. 39
  22. ^ a b Brian Martin (2001) "The Politics of a Scientific Meeting: the Origin-of-AIDS Debate at the Royal Society" in Politics & the Life Sciences, pp. 119-130 online Archived 2008-08-02 at the Wayback Machine
  23. PMID 1509249. Archived from the original
    on 2008-08-21. Retrieved 2006-06-09.
  24. ^ LeBrun A, Cerf J, Gelfand HM, Courtois G, Plotkin SA, Koprowski H (1960) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelities virus in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo 1. Description of the city, its history of poliomyelitis, and the plan of the vaccination campaign", Bull World Health Organ. 22:203-13 online Archived 2008-10-31 at the Wayback Machine
  25. ^ Plotkin SA, LeBrun A, Koprowski H (1960) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelitis virus in Leopoldville. Belgian Congo 2. Studies of the safety and efficacy of vaccination", Bull World Health Organ 22:215-34 online Archived 2012-02-06 at the Wayback Machine
  26. ^ Plotkin SA, LeBrun A, Courtois G, Koprowski H (1961) "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of type 1 attenuated poliomyelitis virus in Leopoldville, Congo 3. Safety and efficacy during the first 21 months of study" Bull World Health Organ 24:785-92 online Archived 2012-02-06 at the Wayback Machine

References

External links

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