Medical Mavericks: Self-Experimentation 2/4 Discovering Vaccines 2007 02 14 BBC

Medical Mavericks: Self-Experimentation 2/4. Discovering Vaccines 2007 02 14 BBC 469.82 MB 00:58:04 XviD MPEG-4 codec www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/medical-maveric... Michael Mosley explores the unbelievable ways in which doctors learnt to harness the immune system by deliberately exposing themselves to incurable diseases like rabies, typhoid and polio; and reports on the team of Nottingham doctors who are currently infecting themselves with hookworms to see if they can shut down the immune system, to cope with allergies like hay fever and asthma. The programme includes the story of living self-experimenter Dr Hilary Koprowski who, in the 1950s, mixed up a potion of ground-up rats brains and drank it in his efforts to develop an oral polio vaccine. Michael Mosley charts the terrible consequences of releasing an un-proven vaccine too early, which happened in the race to control polio in the 1930s and the 1950s. One of the contributors describes the 1950s polio trial which involved millions of children as the worst man-made biological disaster in American history. Shunster ex- thebox bz