Canadian Heroines, Part 2: Leone Norwood Farrell

Dr. Leone Norwood Farrell, Ph. D.

Everyone has heard of Dr. Jonas Salk, the American virologist who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. But have you heard of Dr. Leone Farrell?

If we found the Covid-19 pandemic frightening, imagine the early
1950s when children everywhere were suddenly unable to walk, some dying within days of being stricken. At least 9,000 Canadian children were infected with the polio virus in 1953. Some of the survivors were crippled for life. Some ended up in iron lungs.

So naturally, when Dr. Salk developed his vaccine in 1952, hope began to grow. The potential vaccine was untested, however, largely because no method existed to develop enough vaccine for large-scale testing.

Enter Dr. Farrell. Born in 1904 in a farming community near Monkland, Ontario, and raised in Toronto, Leone Norwood Farrell graduated from Parkdale Collegiate Institute, earning a scholarship in Science and academic prizes in English and History. She studied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, completing her Master’s degree in 1929. Her master’s work led to a research project on the microbiology of honey. This was followed by a year at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, studying the metabolism of fungi in penicillin. After returning to Canada, she became one of a small group of women of her generation to earn a Ph.D. in the sciences by completing her doctorate in biochemistry in 1933. Although she was a strong supporter of women in the lab, she did not consider herself a feminist. Colleagues described her as a classy dresser, most often wearing high heels and a silk blouse beneath her lab coat.

She joined the staff at Connaught Medical Research Laboratories and was an experienced researcher by the time the polio trials started. She had developed what became known as the “Toronto Method,” (I can’t help thinking that if she’d been male, it would be known as the “Farrell Method”) which was a new way of cultivating bacteria in large bottles which were gently rocked to keep the mixture in constant motion. In the early 1940s, Farrell adapted the method for the production of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine on a larger scale. Her method meant vaccines could be accessed for one-tenth the cost. Farrell had spent the war years focused on the elimination of diseases like cholera and dysentery, and giving lectures to medical students and public health nurses.

But it was during the Polio pandemic when her method shone. When Connaught received the contract to produce 3,000 liters of virus fluid needed for testing, Dr. Farrell was charged not only with planning the building of labs and incubators but of training staff. During the winter of 1953-54, she and her staff worked around the clock so that each Thursday, a station wagon could pull up to the door to collect the priceless cargo. From there it went to pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. By the spring of 1954, two million children had participated in field trials of Salk’s polio vaccine and mass immunization swept across North America. Later, Leone Farrell wrote: “Miraculously, there were no poliovirus infections among the large staff involved, although I believe everyone thought at least once that they had contracted the disease.”

In a speech to women in 1959 about the qualities required to become a good medical researcher, she said, “You will want to know why and when and where, and whether pigs have wings… You must let your imagination take flight, while you keep your feet on the ground.”

Dr. Farrell continued her career at Connaught for 35 years, working on other vaccines and antibiotics until her retirement in 1969. In later years, she developed Alzheimer’s Disease and died of lung cancer on September 24, 1986. She’s buried in Toronto’s Park Lawn Cemetery.