DAVID BODIAN, who held both MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, can be counted as one of the unsung heroes of our era. Supported by a grant honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a polio victim, Dr. Bodian entered the Hopkins Department of Anatomy in 1939 as a research fellow. In 1942 he joined the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health as an assistant professor and began working in the poliomyelitis laboratory. With colleagues Howard Howe and Isabel Morgan, he helped lay the groundwork for the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines through research into the neuropathology of poliomyelitis. In addition, Dr. Bodian developed a technique to stain nerve fibers and nerve endings (named the Bodian stain) and made major contributions to the knowledge of the basic structure of nerve cells.
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