[Piet de Somer, the University of Leuven and the Belgium poliovaccine in 1956-57].
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the years following WW II, all 'Western' countries were struck by recurrent epidemics of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis). In the early 1950s, a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in Pittsburgh, became available in the U.S. and Canada. In 1953-54 central virology laboratories in Sweden, Denmark and France were already well advanced in setting up local production lines of the vaccine. At that point in time, the Catholic University of Leuven, on the initiative of the young microbiology professor, Piet De Somer, and in collaboration with the pharmaceutical concern R.I.T. (Recherches et Industries Thérapeutiques, Genval, Belgium), erected a new, multidisciplinary medical research institute, the Rega Institute. One of the research units to be headed by De Somer was destined to introduce the relatively new discipline of virology. As a test case, De Somer decided to venture on developing a production line of the Salk vaccine. In less than one year's time, the project was successful, such that Belgium became one of the first European countries to be self-supporting for its vaccine supply and to be able to initiate a large-scale vaccination campaign. The planning, preparation and execution of the project was accompanied by an extensive correspondence of De Somer with experts and other concerned parties in Belgium and abroad. This correspondence has been preserved and allows for a detailed reconstruction of the remarkable achievement.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".