Medicine: The Ultimate Parasite

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Interferon is not a specific antiviral defense. Dr. Isaacs believes, but one of the body's general defenses. Just what it is or how it works, nobody knows. But the search is being pressed in many labs, including Enders'. Last week Enders told the Washington measles conference that he and a research fellow have just found evidence suggesting that interferon is important in changing a dangerous virus like that of wild measles to the tame Edmonston strain useful for vaccines. In such ways, the findings of many far-flung laboratories fit together, building largely on the Enders cultures that exposed so many viruses to isolation and attack. Once a starveling science that at any given time occupied only a few dozen men, virology has thus fanned out to become the task of thousands moving massively against man's diseases and toward life's most elusive secrets.