SURVIVAL AND MULTIPLICATION OF THE VIRUS OF POLIOMYELITIS IN VITRO

The study here reported concerns attempts at bacteriological cultivations with fragments of brain or cord, or with Berkefeld V filtrates of the nervous tissues, from seven monkeys successfully inoculated with poliomyelitic virus. With these materials, 315 tubes were inoculated, of which thirty-six showed minute bodies resembling the globoid bodies described by Flexner and Noguchi. However, a study of subplants from these minute, morphological particles did not convince us that we had in hand actual cultures of the globoid bodies, or indeed of any living microorganism. Nevertheless, when washed sediments from subplants of one of the strains, representing the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth transfers, were inoculated into monkeys, the clinical signs and pathological effects characteristic of experimental poliomyelitis could be induced. The virulence of the "cultures" could not be ascribed to carrying over the original material into these remote subplants since the seventh transfer represented a dilution of the original cultivated material to about 1.5 x 10(–12), and the tenth, to about 1.3 x 10(–18) if one assume, as the transfer technic justifies, a thorough mixing of the contents of each tube. On the contrary, it appears as if the poliomyelitic virus had multiplied in vitro, and had increased as a consequence of being in a medium of a modified living tissue-cell culture. For in practically all specimens we observed many well-preserved kidney tissue cells and leucocytes, the latter probably derived from human ascitic fluid, a component of the Smith-Noguchi medium. In this connection, it should be mentioned that the several lots of ascitic fluid used in the cultivation tests were recently obtained from patients and employed from a week to a month after their collection. There remains for consideration the problem of the selective pathogenicity of the "cultures:" only the material of those tubes of the ninth and tenth transfers which showed the "globoid bodies" proved pathogenic; those respective tubes of the same transfers which were free from the minute bodies but apparently identical in all other respects, were avirulent. It may be that the virus was adsorbed to the particular bodies which we have found in the "cultures" and which resemble closely the globoid bodies of Flexner and Noguchi. Further elaboration of this study would be necessary, however, before such an inference could be regarded as a definite hypothesis.