When Osama Bin Laden Wrinkled FDR’s Plans

TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This story traces the remarkable journey to eradicate polio, beginning with the humble origins of Booker T. Washington and the establishment of the Tuskegee Institute, which later played a pivotal role in the development of the polio vaccine.

The tale highlights the devastating impact of polio, including on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose personal battle led to the creation of the March of Dimes and its nationwide fundraising efforts.

Crucially, the account reveals the initial exclusion of the Black community from polio treatment and the subsequent establishment of a polio center at Tuskegee, becoming a vital HeLa cell factory thanks to the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks.

Ultimately, the tireless work of scientists like Jonas Salk, supported by the March of Dimes and Tuskegee, led to a vaccine that nearly eradicated the disease globally, though challenges persist, exemplified by a modern setback in vaccine efforts due to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

It Started with Booker

It all started with Booker T. Washington and FDR, both of which are actually the beginning of many important stories. But unlike other stories, this one ends with the entire global population being saved. 

Well, almost.

That was the plan before it was thwarted by the world’s most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

It was 1856 when Booker T. Washington was born on a slave plantation in Virginia. He never knew his father and was largely separated from his mother and siblings as all were forced to work.

But Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1865 and the presence of US troops in the vicinity meant Booker T. Washington and his family were free.

They moved to West Virginia, a free state, to live.

There Booker took it upon himself to learn to read, write, and attend school. He worked in the salt furnaces and coal mines until he was 16 when he made his way by foot 386 miles to the Hampton Institute, a school in Virginia established to educate free lead men.

There he worked as a janitor to pay for it and graduated at 19. After graduation, he returned home to West Virginia for 2 years, helping hometown children during the day and adults at night. But then he got invited back to Hampton where he joined the staff of the school that helped him.

The Creation of Tuskegee Normal School

Meanwhile, down in Alabama, Wilbur F. Foster was an Alabama senator who was up for reelection. He knew the US Congress had just passed a bill intended to improve education in the South for black Americans and thought that this knowledge might be the bargaining chip he needed to win his re-election. 

So he approached a local black leader, Lewis Adams, with a trade. If Lewis would convince the local black constituents to vote for him, he’d push the state of Alabama to establish a school for black citizens in the county.

And so Lewis did his job which helped Wilbur get reelected. And then in February of 1881, the Alabama State Legislature authorized the bill to create the school.

It would be called the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers.

$2,000 was approved for annual expenses, and its doors would be open on July 4th, 1881.

Before it opened, Lewis Adams and George Campbell, a banker involved with getting it open, knew they were going to need a good head instructor and principal.

So, they wrote Hampton School in Virginia for help. Hampton School had the perfect candidate.

They sent 25-year-old Booker T. Washington.

And the school started with 30 adults in a one room shanty. The school grew quickly, and by 1896, Booker would be ready for an agricultural teacher.

Coming from Hampton School, he knew he should shoot high, find the best candidate. And so he settled on the only black American who had a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in agriculture, George Washington Carver.

Who knew such meager beginnings would change the world?

Tuskegee would go on to become famous for the work of George Washington Carver and the bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen. But Tuskegee played another important role that is not often mentioned, one that affected millions of people.

Which brings us to 1905, the first year the polio virus was detected. 

When Polio Arrived

While polio made it on the list of important health hazards to watch out for in 1905, it wouldn’t be until 1916 until the world experienced the first polio epidemic. That’s when polio would finally get major attention.

The epidemic started in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. And at first, all that was known was that it largely affected children, more boys than girls, and soon they learned it also spiked in summer.

The epidemic caused quite a scare with the first response being blame placed on the expanding immigrant population, which was not a new phenomenon as cholera was originally blamed on the Irish and tuberculosis was blamed on the Jewish.

In a democratic society where the leaders are often more worried about the next election than their constituents, the government reacted briskly and harshly. With the public terrified, they couldn’t wait for research results.

So, they enacted sewage regulations, installed new water purification systems, removed trash everywhere in the city, and killed 72,000 cats. Condemned buildings were boarded up, public parks and pools. Schools were closed and all ethnic festivals were cancelled.

By July of 1916, children under 16 had to get a health certificate that stated “polio free” in order to leave the state of New York.

Nearly 27,000 people got polio, 80% of which were children under five. And then on September 10th, 1921, the myth that it only affected children in high population density areas was shattered.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt while vacationing in New Brunswick, Canada was diagnosed with polio.

He was quickly transferred to Columbia Presbyterian in New York City for the start of his treatment. And with that, the media began to take notice of polio cases in more affluent population areas, which took the scare to a new level.

At the time, FDR had served as senator from New York for two years, had visited the Panama Canal, and was known for being Secretary of the Navy in World War I. In the year prior, he’d been the Vice Presidential nominee during the presidential election.

Polio had paralyzed FDR from the waist down, from which he would never recover.

The media and American public, however, did a fantastic job respecting that, avoiding putting attention on his legs. Despite being paralyzed, FDR and his friend Basil O’Conor started a law firm.

During that time, FDR pursued every avenue he could to find a fix for his condition.

FDR Begins to Fight Polio

One of the leads he followed was a healing natural spring in Georgia called Warm Springs. It was a spa of sorts known for the water’s healing powers.

The owners were having financial troubles keeping it open, and after several visits, FDR bought it.

He liked it so much he ended up using the quiet restful time to start writing a book called “Wither Bound”. In 1926, he and Basil decided to start a nonprofit in Warm Springs as a therapy center for other victims of polio.

 However, he could only focus on that project for 2 years as he decided to run for Governor of New York in 1928, passing the reigns of Warm Springs off to Basil.

The 1929 Great Depression would make fundraising for this Warm Springs Therapy Center even more difficult. On top of that, the Democratic Party put FDR on the national ticket for president in 1932, which he won, defeating Herbert Hoover.

With FDR as president now, Warm Springs started to get more visitors. Thus, Basil needed to raise more money than FDR could provide by himself.

In 1936 during his second presidential term, Basil and FDR decided to make polio research more important, and so they started the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the NFIP.

Basil convinced FDR to use his position as President, with access to the White House, to raise money. The next year, Basil came up with the idea of putting on a big birthday bash for the President as a fundraising tool.

He would actually organize 3,100 local chapters nationwide to hold their own birthday ball to raise funds. Every city held its own dance to which they got 4,376 communities to join.

This national campaign also had collection cans everywhere like diner countertops, movie theaters, and schools, all of which requested the person to put one dime into the collection box.

Basil also got megastar popular singer Eddie Cantor on board to help to which he made a public appeal on national radio. Like the collection jars, he asked America if they would send in a dime, claiming it would be the March of Dimes.

Other stars helped spread the word like Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Edgar Bergen, and even the Lone Ranger. Ira T. Smith, the White House mailroom manager, said 30,000 letters came in the day after the campaign started, then 50,000, then 150,000 on the third day.

He said the government was almost shut down because they couldn’t manage the piles.

It took 4 months to clean up, and they had raised $1 million, which was split between the local chapters and Warm Springs. They were well on their way to eradicating polio, forever.

But there were yet some hurdles.

Of course, how could they ever foresee there would one day be a terrorist in Afghanistan who would make it even harder?

Racism Starts at the Top

While the campaign’s birthday balls and diner top donation jars were successful, the whole plan had one major flaw. FDR’s Warm Springs Therapeutic Health facility for those suffering from polio was a whites only facility. 

While it was thought in the beginning that polio only affected children in the ethnic suburbs, that thought changed as polio spread. The spread of polio was known, discussed, and reported because doctors would report all their data to the same higher authorities.

Even today, that seems like a reliable source of information.

But reliable data in a broken system is broken data.

It was the data itself that led authorities to rumor black Americans were not susceptible to polio. And so little attention was paid to the black community when they pleaded for help.

Authorities merely waved off each case as a one-time anomaly.

The problem existed because there were very few, if any, medical institutions that accepted black patients, and fewer that would accept them for polio.

So when a black mother was facing a child suffering from polio symptoms, why drag them all the way to a doctor only to be turned away?

And thus the data was wrong.

But the black community was fully behind FDR’s fundraising campaigns, holding their own birthday balls and putting their own dimes in the collection jars.

After the big campaign was over, Basil announced how much the NFIP had raised and just how the money was going to be used.

And just like Lucy would grab the football just before Charlie Brown would kick it, the black community found out none of the money was going to places that would help them. And a large amount was being sent to the whites only Warm Springs facility.

The black community was outraged and embarrassed and hurt.

Both FDR and Basil knew they had made a mistake.

They had a problem and felt a great deal of pressure to solve it.

So in 1939, Basil made an announcement, one he hoped would help cover the mistake. He announced that their biggest grant they were going to give of $161,350 was going to be for the construction of a new polio center at Tuskegee Institute.

Basil said it would provide the most modern treatment for colored infantile paralysis victims. and it would train negro doctors and surgeons for orthopedic work.

They hoped that serving as both a health care facility and a training facility would compensate for the many hospitals in Alabama and across the region that had no care options.

And they were probably correct for the people who lived within 10 miles of Tuskegee. The center opened in 1941 with much fanfare, marked by a nationally broadcast radio announcement.

Nobody was more excited about the new polio focus at Tuskegee than George Washington Carver.

While he had virtually revolutionized the peanut industry single-handedly, he also spent considerable time researching ways to solve the polio crisis. In a feature in the magazine Reader Digest, they photo that used of him was him sitting next to a pile of letters from mothers of polio victims.

Plus, he was in declining health himself and very much wanted his research to live on. So, he did what few would even consider. He took his life savings and created the Carver Foundation and built another research facility that ended up making Tuskegee a very progressive institution.

Which brings us to the next hero in our story and closer to the eradication of polio.

Jonas Salk’s Work on Polio

Jonas Salk was born on October 28th, 1914.

His parents had immigrated from Minsk, Russia when he was 12 – to New York City.

Jonas was an avid reader, reading everything he could get his hands on. His love of learning convinced his parents to send him to a high school for gifted children. And while they wanted to send him to a college like Harvard, they didn’t have the money.

So he went to City College in New York in 1934.

To some, City College was considered second rate because it had no research labs and no noted scholars. But the students who attended City College didn’t agree. They worked hard to get there.

Their talent was like no other place.

In fact, in the 30s and 40s, eight Nobel Prize winners came from City College, more than any other school, but Berkeley.

So Jonas Salk was on the path to success.

After City College, he went to NYU Med, knowing he wanted to focus on medicine, but unsure how. What intrigued him most were the NYU grads like Walter Reed, who had found the cure for Yellow Fever.

He very much liked the idea of doing something that would help millions of people versus being a doctor and helping one patient at a time. His interest was peaked many times during school, causing him to change his major frequently.

At one time, biochemistry and another bacteriology.

During his final year of school, he spent the year studying a newly discovered illness called influenza. His work on influenza landed him a job at the University of Michigan working with Thomas Francis, who also worked for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Thomas was the guy who had discovered Type B influenza. The two-month stint there focused entirely on virology got Jonas hooked. He had finally found his life’s passion.

Together, he and Thomas Francis worked diligently on a vaccine for Influenze. They actually had received a US Army commission with the specific goal being an influenza vaccine for the soldiers, which they made.

By 1947, Jonas wanted his own lab, which he got when the University of Pittsburgh recruited him and his stated goal to determine the number of types of polio then create a vaccine.

That’s when Basil O’Connor’s March of Dimes team contacted Jonas telling they wanted to help finance his polio cure goal. To this point, the March of Dimes money had gone to fund places like Tuskegee, Warm Springs, and the manufacturing of iron lungs to help polio survivors breathe.

But ultimately they decided that funding the cure would be better use of money than funding care. Which brings us to a very unlikely hero in the story. Sadly, a person who has never known her own impact. But don’t forget, we’re still looking for a cure for polio, complete eradication of the disease, and the reason a terrorist would foil the plot 60 years later.

Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lax was born in 1920 in Rowan Oak, Virginia. When she was four, her mother died while giving birth to her 10th child.

After that, Henrietta’s dad couldn’t figure out how to care for the children and work.

So, he moved them to Clover, Virginia, near extended family, where each child was was informally adopted by a relative. Henrietta ended up at her maternal grandmother’s house.

There she helped out by working on the tobacco farm, feeding the animals, and tending the garden.

In 1941, she married David Lax, and they moved to Maryland so David could work at Bethlehem Steel, which the impending war increased the demand for the services.

After the war, Henrietta had three children, her last being in 1950 at John Hopkins. That was 4 months before Henrietta herself was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

Prior to her pregnancy, she had been experiencing abdomen pain. But once she found out she was pregnant, she assumed that was the reason. But then after the birth, the tightness continued and she began hemorrhaging.

The doctors then took biopsy samples and found out she had cancer. But despite immediate radium two midserts in treatment. Henrietta died in October of 1951.

But that is when the story of this hero begins.

John Hopkins Hospital had a researcher on staff who specialized in cervical cancer, similar to the way the University of Pittsburgh had researcher, Jonah Salk, focus on polio. So at John Hopkins, they made sure that their cervical cancer researcher, Dr. George Gay, got a tissue sample from every cervical cancer patient.

They made sure to get him one from everyone because the cells in the samples would always die quite quickly.

That gave him a limited amount of time with each.

But Henrietta Lack’s cells were different.

Different than every sample he’d ever received. Instead of dying within 72 hours, Henrietta Lack’s cells doubled in number, every 24 hours.

Not every cell, of course, but he was able to isolate one specific cell that would double and placed it in an environment he had spent 30 years preparing for this exact moment.

It took 30 years to find an immortal cell, and this one he named Hela, for Henrietta Lacks. Dr. Gay knew what greatness would come from this cell.

Most researchers use cells from Rhesus’s monkeys to do things like test the response of an anti-body when it was exposed to something like polio, but it was hard to get enough Rhesus monkey cells.

The Hela cell line would solve that problem.

At this time, by 1950 even, polio was a full-blown summer epidemic. It was the single largest threat to public health.

Now, children were given polio tests every day by their parents by asking them to touch their toes, put their chin on their chest, and twist, all looking for signs of aches and pains.

• Pools were closed.
• Theaters required empty seats between people.
• Shaking hands stopped.
• The Boy Scouts went around spraying trash cans with disease-killing agents. 

The vaccine couldn’t come soon enough.

Creating the Polio Vaccine

In 1952, there were 50,000 cases of polio, resulting in 3,145 deaths and 60,000 cases in 1953.

Those who didn’t die were often placed in an iron lung to breathe like 6-year-old Paul Alexander and 5-year-old Martha Lillard.

Well, it was 1952 when Jonas Salk told Henry Weaver, then the new director of the March of Dimes, that he might have discovered a cure, but that he’d need a massive amount of cells to test it to make make sure it was safe.

Harry Weaver had just heard about the immortal Hela cells at John Hopkins.

He immediately wanted to create a line of their own for testing of the vaccine.

The March of Dimes’s strongest relationship with a group who could do this kind of work were the researchers at the Tuskegee Institute.

The Carver Foundation there was headed by two black scientists, Russell Brown and James Henderson.

Weaver asked them if they would be interested in turning the place into the world’s most modern Hela cell factory. They were being asked to save humanity at a time when their humanity was often denied.

But they didn’t hesitate.

Tuskegee contacted Jonas Salk to find out what he would need and they were told 10,000 glass tubes of cells every week. They didn’t really know what that would require, but they knew the University of Minnesota were experts in culture generation.

So on January 16th, 1953, Brown and Henderson boarded a train in Alabama to go to the coldest state during its coldest month.

At the time, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were segregated. Finding on campus housing for two black men would not be easy. And despite these two men attempting to save the world, the best the university could do was finding rooms near the edge of campus, making every day an ice cold walk.

For 4 weeks, they learned everything they could and returned with an equipment list for the March of Dimes.

The March of Dimes provided everything, and by March 1st, Tuskegee was ready.

But they would have to wait until April for the temperatures to warm up before the University of Minnesota would transport to them Hela cells. That’s when the researcher at Minnesota boarded the plane with a carry-on of glass tubes on the way to Birmingham.

They arrived with 30 million Hela cells.

At Tuskegee, they added a liquid to the cells, then fed 40 other bottles with it. After 4 days of incubation, each bottle had 30 million cells and the birth of the Tuskegee Hela Factory had begun.

Over 20,000 Hela cell tubes were sent each week. Each sample was infected by the polio virus, then mixed with the blood of a person who’d been given the vaccine.

By early 1955, Jonas Salk’s vaccine was deemed safe and distributed to the nation.

The push to get people vaccinated was massive.

Over 20,000 doctors, 40 000 nurses, 1,000 public health professionals, 14,000 school principles, 50,000 teachers, 200,000 volunteers, and 420,000 children were injected.

Even Elvis Presley got vaccinated live on the Ed Sullivan Show. Jonas Salk, the March of Dimes, and the Tuskegee Institute were all praised for their work on the polio vaccine, but it wouldn’t be for another 21 years before anyone knew the name Henrietta Lacks.

That’s when a writer named Michael Rogers wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine about this immortal line of cells.

His article cited Dr. George Gay at John Hopkins and for the first time why they were called Hela cells.

While the vaccine and subsequent vaccines were effective, the last person in the Americas to have polio was a child named Luis Cortez in 1991 in Peru. For the most part, by the year 2000, polio was virtually eradicated from the earth, but not yet 100%.

Not for any real length of time.

And then, in what seems like an almost impossible connection to today’s story, on 9/11 2001, terrorists masterfully planned an attack on the United States, taking down its twin towers in New York City and Pentagon in Washington DC.

That is when the US began a massive manhunt for the leader responsible for the attack, Mr. Osama bin Laden.

It would be 10 years of chasing leads before they would finally track down his location, but they had no real hard evidence that it was actually him. They had found a courier who was known to regularly deliver things to bin Laden. The courier was in Pakistan when they found him and following him led to a fully fortified compound located in Abadisbad, Pakistan.

But before the US President Obama would sign off on attacking this compound on foreign soil, he needed more proof. They really needed someone inside to take a picture or provide some real evidence of Osama bin Laden.

That’s when someone picked up on the idea that the region was in a hepatitis run. They thought they might be able to use that to get inside.

So, they sent a doctor to his door who was making the rounds giving hepatitis shots. Unfortunately, the doctor was denied entry.

But in a twist of fate, he was given a phone number and asked to call back later to set up a time.

Luckily for US Intelligence, the number he was given was a number that had previously been tied to Osama bin Laden.

All the evidence they had gathered together was enough to plan a mission. So the raid happened and the world’s most notorious terrorist was killed.

Which brings us back to the story.

After the death of Osama bin Laden, it was learned that a doctor had played a role leading to him being killed. That is when the people of Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan lost faith in health workers and so they started to refuse getting vaccines including the polio vaccine.

Therefore, in 2017, despite 70 years of battling polio, Pakistan and Afghanistan were the only two countries that had reported cases.

They had 17.

Since then, the US has banned using healthcare workers in any military operation, which leaves FDR’s goal of eradicating polio still unfinished.