Bernice Eddy (September 30, 1903–May 24, 1989) was an American
virologist
Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses. It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, thei ...
and
epidemiologist
Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.
It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidenc ...
polyomavirus
''Polyomaviridae'' is a family of viruses whose natural hosts are primarily mammals and birds. As of 2020, there are six recognized genera and 117 species, five of which are unassigned to a genus. 14 species are known to infect humans, while othe ...
, particularly
SV40
SV40 is an abbreviation for simian vacuolating virus 40 or simian virus 40, a polyomavirus that is found in both monkeys and humans. Like other polyomaviruses, SV40 is a DNA virus that has the potential to cause tumors in animals, but most often ...
polyomavirus.
Personal life and education
Early life
Eddy was born in 1903 into a family of
physician
A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...
s in
Glen Dale, West Virginia
Glen Dale is a city in Marshall County, West Virginia, United States, along the Ohio River. It is part of the Wheeling, West Virginia Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 1,514 at the 2020 census. Glen Dale was incorporated in 1924 ...
. Eddy and her family: Nathan E. Eddy and Clara C. Eddy (née Griffith), lived in
Auburn, West Virginia
Auburn is a town in Ritchie County, West Virginia, United States. The population was 80 at the 2020 census.
Geography
Auburn is located at (39.095430, -80.856538), in the east south-east corner of Ritchie County.
According to the United States C ...
. She was the oldest of four children. Eddy and her mother moved to
Marietta, Ohio
Marietta is a city in, and the county seat of, Washington County, Ohio, United States. It is located in southeastern Ohio at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, northeast of Parkersburg, West Virginia. As of the 2020 census, Ma ...
a few years after her father's death. Eddy graduated at
Marietta College
Marietta College (MC) is a private liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio. It offers more than 50 undergraduate majors across the arts, sciences, and engineering, as well as Physician Assistant, Psychology, Clinical Mental Health Counseling, a ...
in 1924. She went on to study at
University of Cincinnati
The University of Cincinnati (UC or Cincinnati) is a public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1819 as Cincinnati College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in Cincinnati and has an annual enrollment of over 44,0 ...
, earning a
Master's degree
A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.
in 1925 and a bacteriology
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in 1927.
Family life
Eddy married Dr. Jerald G. Wooley in 1938, at the age of 35 and the couple worked at NIH as bacteriologists. Eddy and Wooley had two daughters, Bernice and Sarah. Jerald Guy Wooley died at the age of 64, leaving Eddy with their two daughters. Eddy was 52 years old when her husband passed, it was noted that her mother helped her raise them.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) career
In 1930 Eddy joined the
United States Public Health Service
The United States Public Health Service (USPHS or PHS) is a collection of agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services concerned with public health, containing nine out of the department's twelve operating divisions. The Assistant ...
(USPHS). In 1935 Eddy transferred to the
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
(NIH) in
Bethesda, Maryland
Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which in ...
, where she joined the Biologics Control Division, the department of the NIH responsible for checking the quality of
vaccines
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified.< ...
distributed by the
Federal government of the United States
The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fe ...
. Most notably, Eddy was responsible for testing different Polio vaccines from 5 different companies while working in the Biologics Control Division.
Flu vaccine testing
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, Eddy was made responsible for checking the quality of influenza vaccines used by the
United States Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...
. As part of the Biologics Control Division, Eddy and her team created the first reliable potency test for flu vaccines so that the quality and effectiveness would be consistent throughout manufacturing. Eddy tested Army flu vaccines for 16 years until she was promoted to chief of flu virus vaccine testing in 1944.
Polio vaccine research
In parallel to her job as chief of flu virus vaccine testing, Eddy began research on
polio vaccine
Polio vaccines are vaccines used to prevent poliomyelitis (polio). Two types are used: an inactivated poliovirus given by injection (IPV) and a weakened poliovirus given by mouth (OPV). The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends all chi ...
s at NIH in 1952. 1952 was when the polio virus reached its peak in the US with over 59,000 confirmed cases. In 1953, she was awarded the NIH Superior Accomplishment Award for the research on polio vaccines.
Cutter incident
In 1954, the NIH delegated Eddy to perform safety tests for a batch of inactivated polio vaccines developed by
Jonas Salk
Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New ...
for
Cutter Laboratories
Cutter Laboratories was a family-owned pharmaceutical company located in Berkeley, California, founded by Edward Ahern Cutter in 1897. Cutter's early products included anthrax vaccine, hog cholera (swine fever) virus, and anti-hog cholera serum ...
. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine that was to be used in a massive national vaccination program. Eddy's job was to test the inactivated vaccines from five different companies. After testing the vaccines on 18 monkeys, she and her team discovered that Cutter Laboratories' vaccine contained residual live
poliovirus
A poliovirus, the causative agent of polio (also known as poliomyelitis), is a serotype of the species '' Enterovirus C'', in the family of ''Picornaviridae''. There are three poliovirus serotypes: types 1, 2, and 3.
Poliovirus is composed of a ...
, resulting in the monkeys showing polio-like symptoms and paralysis. Eddy found that three of the six batches paralyzed monkeys and therefore contained live polio virus. These findings pointed to a flawed vaccine manufacturing process at Cutter Laboratories. Eddy reported her findings regarding the flawed vaccines to the head of the Laboratory of Biologics Control, William Workman. Unfortunately, Workman did not heed Eddy's warnings; the identified problems with the vaccine was not passed down to the licensing advisory committee. Workman invalidated Eddy's findings and dismissed her off of the polio research. She was put back on duty to test on flu vaccines in response.The flawed vaccine was licensed for use to the public. 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained improperly inactivated version of the live polio virus was manufactured and produced. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a less aggressive form of the disease that does not involve the
central nervous system
The central nervous system (CNS) is the part of the nervous system consisting primarily of the brain and spinal cord. The CNS is so named because the brain integrates the received information and coordinates and influences the activity of all p ...
), 51 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. The exposures led to an
epidemic
An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί ''epi'' "upon or above" and δῆμος ''demos'' "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of patients among a given population within an area in a short period of time.
Epidemics of infectious ...
of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in the death of 5 children and 113 others paralyzed with the nastier paralytic poliomyelitis. On April 29, 1955 NIH director William Sebrell chaired a meeting to examine Cutter's manufacturing protocols. The meeting was also attended by Eddy and produced no conclusion on what Cutter should do differently in its manufacturing process.
On May 6, 1955, NIH Associate Director Leonard A. Scheele announced to the press that the national polio vaccination program would be postponed until further notice. Vaccine manufacturers withheld 3.9 million doses of polio vaccine as a result, and the polio vaccine program suspension in the United States was followed by a suspension of similar polio vaccination drives in Great Britain, Sweden, West Germany and South Africa. The Cutter Incident was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in US history, and exposed several thousand children to live polio virus on vaccination.
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare
The United States secretary of health and human services is the head of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and serves as the principal advisor to the president of the United States on all health matters. The secretary is ...
Oveta Culp Hobby
Oveta Culp Hobby (January 19, 1905 – August 16, 1995) was an American politician and businessperson who served as the first United States secretary of health, education, and welfare from 1953 to 1955. A member of the Republican Party, Hobby wa ...
stepped down. Sebrell, the director of the NIH, resigned.
Polyomavirus research
After the
Cutter incident
Cutter Laboratories was a family-owned pharmaceutical company located in Berkeley, California, founded by Edward Ahern Cutter in 1897. Cutter's early products included anthrax vaccine, hog cholera (swine fever) virus, and anti-hog cholera serum— ...
in 1954, Eddy had been sidelined for whistleblowing about the presence of live virus in Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine. She was later on approached by her NIH colleague Sarah Elizabeth Stewart in 1956 while both were working on testing common cold vaccines. Stewart approached Eddy for assistance growing the agent causing parotid tumors in mice. Eddy readily agreed and the two women rapidly worked out the characteristics of the agent that was not referred to as a virus in their publications until 1959. Building on earlier work by
Ludwig Gross
Ludwik Gross (September 11, 1904 – July 19, 1999) was a Polish-American virologist who discovered two different tumor viruses—murine leukemia virus and mouse polyomavirus—capable of causing cancers in laboratory mice.
Biography
Gross w ...
, Stewart and Bernice E. Eddy were the first to describe a polyomavirus. They did so by injecting the mice with ground organs of other mice that were known to contain leukemia, and observing cancerous tumor growth that was unrelated to leukemia. They satisfied
cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...
to be transmitted from animal to animal. Stewart and Eddy continued to test the theory that viral components are able to induce tumors. They tested tumor extracts from both monkey and mouse embryos, and found that the mouse embryos contained a higher quantity of cancer causing viral agents, thus leading them to reason that viruses can be causative agents of cancer. The virus can be absorbed onto guinea pig, hamster, or human 0 erythrocytes in the cold-causing hemag- glutination. They also concluded that the polyomavirus was able to cause 20 different types of mouse tumors. Some of the tumors observed were angiomatous sarcomas in Syrian hamsters, sarcomas in rats, and mesenchymal nodules in rabbits. Eddy and Stewart demonstrated that the virus causes cell necrosis and proliferation in cell culture, that it is highly antigenic, and that it leads to formation of specific antibodies in infected animals whether or not tumors develop. At Eddy's suggestion, the virus was dubbed polyoma, which means many tumors. The virus was named the Stewart-Eddy or SE polyoma virus, after their respective surnames. The results of their collaboration earned them recognition by Time magazine in 1959, featuring a cover story on newly discovered viral agents that cause cancer.
Ludwik Gross rivalry
Ludwik Gross
Ludwik Gross (September 11, 1904 – July 19, 1999) was a Polish-American virologist who discovered two different tumor viruses—murine leukemia virus and mouse polyomavirus—capable of causing cancers in laboratory mice.
Biography
Gross w ...
and Sarah Stewart had been researching cancer-causing viruses concurrently and separately, and had been aware of each other's work since at least December 1952. Both had independently discovered parotid tumors around the same time, and each reprimanded the other for not citing each other's work. When Stewart and Eddy, along with Borgese, published their 1958 paper on a parotid tumor-inducing virus (later named the SE polyomavirus), Gross' earlier work on the parotid virus was not cited. The rivalry came to a peak in 1958, when Jacob Furth attributed the discovery of the parotid tumor virus to both Stewart and Gross. While Gross claimed to be the first discoverer of the virus, Stewart maintained that she and Eddy discovered it independently. When the virus was renamed "SE polyomavirus" for Stewart and Eddy, Gross felt that this diminished his role in the discovery, and he wrote several letters to his peers arguing his point. Later, Eddy would agree, going on to state that, "Sarah was very aggressive. We named it. We probably shouldn't have," and "He (Gross) had that virus before we did. There was no question."
SV40 virus research
In 1959, Eddy began to conduct safety studies on polio vaccines, which used viruses grown in monkey kidney cells. In 1961, Eddy showed that an extract of rhesus monkey kidney cells (RMKC) used in the creation of the polio vaccine caused tumors in newborn hamsters. Specifically, 109 of 154 mice injected with RMKC extracts showed signs of tumor growth. The extracts of these neoplasms were transplanted into a new group of mice where similar tumor growth was observed. Tumor extract transplants occurred for 5 generations of mice, where the last group all showed tumor growth. In 1962, Eddy presented evidence that the oncological agent present in the RMKC serum was capable of inducing histologically similar tumors under the same conditions as SV40, and that these tumors showed different properties than the SE polyoma virus, which was the only other biological material known to be capable of inducing tumors in almost all hamsters injected as newborns. Similar to SV40, RMKC extracts remained infectious after passage through filters, and similar levels of exposure to diethyl ether, heat, and storage at -70 °C. Eddy also provided evidence that the RMKC extracts were inhibited (tumors would not develop) under conditions that also inhibited SV40 tumor development. This includes inhibition in animals that received RMKC extracts combined with anti-SV40 rabbit serum. Given the preponderance of evidence, this paper drew the conclusion that the oncological agent in the RMKC extracts were identical to the SV40 virus.
This discovery was of both practical and theoretical importance. Practically speaking, the discovery explained the origins of the widespread contamination of a variety of stocks of seed viruses and live polio virus vaccine by SV40 that had been written about in a 1960 paper written by Ben Sweet and Maurice Hilleman. Eddy suggested that this contamination could be avoided in the future by screening cultures of ''C. aethiops'' kidney cells for the characteristic cytopathic (cellular) changes that SV40 causes. This finding led Merck to voluntarily withdraw its killed-virus polio vaccine. Theoretically speaking, it added to a growing body of evidence that the monkey, like the mouse, could harbor oncogenic (cancer-causing) viruses that could affect other animal species.
In 1998, the
National Cancer Institute
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...
undertook a large study, using cancer case information from the institute's SEER database. The published findings from the study were considered of little value in a 2002 review that called for further investigation. Another large study in Sweden examined cancer rates of 700,000 individuals who had received potentially contaminated polio vaccine as late as 1957; the study again revealed no increased cancer incidence between persons who received polio vaccines containing SV40 and those who did not. The question of whether SV40 causes cancer in humans remains controversial, however, and the development of improved assays for detection of SV40 in human tissues will be needed to resolve the controversy.
Other notable research
Leprosy research
In 1937, Eddy and her colleagues studied multiple aspects of ''
Mycobacterium leprae
''Mycobacterium leprae'' (also known as the leprosy bacillus or Hansen's bacillus), is one
of the two species of bacteria that cause Hansen’s disease (leprosy), a chronic but curable infectious disease that damages the peripheral nerves an ...
'', the bacteria that causes leprosy, to gain valuable information for future diagnostic purposes. One study conducted by Eddy included finding new mediums on which to culture ''Mycobacterium leprae'' in labs. Another notable study done by Eddy includes the research on certain behaviors of leprosy bacteria in the presence of leukocytes.
Retirement/death
Eddy retired from the NIH in 1973 aged 70. Upon retirement she received several awards, including a Special Citation from the secretary of the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of all Americans and providing essential human services. Its motto is ...
(HEW). Eddy died on the 24th of May, 1989 due to cardiopulmonary arrest.
Awards and honors
Eddy received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Marietta College in 1955, and the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare awarded her a Superior Service Medal in 1967. She was then honored with the NIH Director's Award in 1977. This is the most prestigious awards ceremony and it honors the great achievements throughout the NIH. Eddy and her research partner Sarah E. Stewart were nominated twice for the Nobel Prize.