Cell Strain
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine that breathed for polio victims, sometimes for years. Scientists raced to find a vaccine. After a few hard years of widespread quarantine and isolation, the scientists succeeded. The discovery of the polio vaccine was one of the brightest moments in public health history. But a vaccine required Americans to believe in a truth they couldn’t see with their own eyes. It also raised questions of access, of racial equity, and of the federal government’s role in healthcare, questions whose legacy we’re living with today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:05.0 | There's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:12.0 | There's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:15.0 | A quarter of the mind, lined with shelves, cluttered with proof, stocked like a biological laboratory with microscopes, stacks of slides, |
| 0:26.7 | trays of glass vials, each topped with a black rubber stopper. This label says, |
| 0:34.0 | live virus. |
| 0:35.0 | Oh God, there's a storage closet here, |
| 0:40.0 | crowded with crutches and splints and braces, lined up by size down to the tiniest, |
| 0:46.0 | fitted for toddlers. |
| 0:49.0 | Nor here, a terrifying machine, looks like something between a steel coffin and an MRI. It's an iron |
| 0:57.4 | lung. This place, this laboratory, stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. |
| 1:06.0 | It lies in a time between now and then. |
| 1:09.0 | The sign on the door reads, |
| 1:11.0 | The last archive. |
| 1:13.0 | Step across the threshold |
| 1:17.0 | to an elementary school classroom in the year |
| 1:20.0 | 1955. It's time for health class, kids seated in wooden desks lined up in rows on squeaky linoleum floors. |
| 1:35.0 | The teacher in an A-line skirt and pumps draws the blinds and wheels out a projector. |
| 1:41.0 | Today they're watching a film. |
| 1:43.0 | The symptoms are quite familiar. |
| 1:45.0 | Yes, it looks like a cold. |
| 1:47.0 | Scientists think that most colds are caused by extremely small microorganisms called viruses. |
... |
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