Returning now to the scientific aspects of this story, there was huge fermentation of activity in the mid-'60s. One of the first things that happened in respect to vaccine development, which will become more important in subsequent years, is that the military in the United States was well aware of the group of adenoviruses that I described earlier, some of which I worked with as a postdoctoral student in Charlie Pomerat's lab, and that several of these viruses within that group caused an upper respiratory disease in military recruits. This, of course, was not limited to the United States. It happened in European facilities of a similar nature, and in college dormitories, and it was very debilitating. It was like a serious common cold. It wasn't life threatening, usually, but recruits would come together and hundreds of them would have to be hospitalized or put to bed for a week, and this was enormously expensive, and all of the other problems that would be apparent.

The military decided to produce... to try to produce a vaccine to... to resolve this problem. They set about to do it. I was not directly involved, although they knew that WI-26 and/or 38 was capable of growing these viruses. They did get starter cultures from me, and did the necessary research to produce a vaccine, to try it out in the military, and ultimately discover that it was successful. This is an important point, because the laws in the United States do not require the military to have any product like that that they develop under contract to be tested and approved by either... by the then Division of Biologic Standards, which is the group at the NIH that approves civilian biological products.

So the military has this freedom to bypass the usual control authorities. Of course, they attempt to be as careful and critical as they can be. They're not trying to evade the law or to get away with anything, they simply by law have that power, and they took advantage of that. And in the early '60s, soon after I published my work, they produced a successful adenovirus vaccine, and I believe it's been produced off and on ever since, also in other countries in Europe.