Animal food production alters
human quality of life      

Monkey food fights polio

[NOV. 15, 2004]  URBANA -- Fifty years ago next year, Jonas Salk's breakthrough vaccine that lifted a burden of fear from the shoulders of parents in the United States and around the world was approved for use. But the widespread vaccine distribution that stopped polio was considerably speeded up by an innocuous commodity -- monkey food.

"Salk was using rhesus monkeys shipped from India as kidney cell donors for the vaccine's testing and development, but the animals were so malnourished that they arrived debilitated in the United States," said James E. Corbin, professor emeritus of animal sciences at the University of Illinois. "Salk turned to a medical colleague, Bill Danforth, who was a surgeon and a member of the family that owned Ralston Purina, asking him to see if a food could be developed that could be shipped to India to feed the monkeys and provide healthy animals for Dr. Salk's vaccine tests."

Corbin, then a researcher at Ralston Purina, and his colleague, Joe Vandepopuliere, were given the challenge.

"We were only with the company six months, so that request was intimidating, but we obtained a colony of young monkeys and began feeding them a highly nutritious extruded feed," he recalled. "The monkeys thrived, and Salk shipped the new food to his Indian suppliers. The next group of monkeys from India arrived in the United States in excellent condition.

"Within a year, Salk told me that the creation of the monkey food speeded up development of the polio vaccine by five years."

James Corbin

Corbin's role in the successful fight against polio is one of many career achievements that recently earned him the Griffin Award, the most prestigious honor bestowed by the 11,000-member American Association for Laboratory Science for outstanding contributions to animal research.

A native of western Kentucky, Corbin earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in animal science at the University of Kentucky and his doctorate in animal nutrition and nutritional biochemistry at the University of Illinois.

Beginning his career at Ralston Purina in 1954, Corbin and his colleague, Vandepopuliere, revolutionized the way companion animal owners feed their pets as well as other types of food fed to livestock, including a new ration that led to massive expansion of the commercial catfish industry, which today needs a lake equivalent to 1 mile wide and 200 miles long to contain its fish production.

A 1957 St. Louis Globe-Democrat article on the work of Corbin and Vandepopouliere at Ralston Purina described them as "running what is perhaps the world's 'most unusual diet kitchen,'" responsible for not only creating "new dishes" but ones that "must taste good enough so that they are unusual, so unusual that their sometimes temperamental guests will eat them in preference to anything else." It was a "kitchen" that cooked for "monkeys, cats, dogs, mice, rats of the laboratory variety, game birds such as pheasants and quail" and "fish, such as mountain trout, blue gills, catfish and minnows."

Returning to the U of I in 1973, Corbin established a world-class program of companion animal research and teaching and in his retirement continues to be in demand as a consultant well-known to animal professionals around the world. Professors George Fahey and Neal Merchen, Corbin noted, have led the companion animal research program to one that is now considered to be the world's best.

The modest Corbin squirms a bit when such achievements are recounted and stresses associates like Vandepopuliere and the "fantastic" teams of researchers he has worked with in private industry and at the U of I.

When Corbin began at Ralston Purina, most pets were fed table scraps. Under Corbin's leadership, the world's first extruded animal food was produced. Today, something that did not exist 55 years ago is a $19.4 billion pet food industry in the United States alone. Each day, the equivalent of 850 boxcars of dog and cat food is produced in the United States. The development of extruded foods was also of benefit to all zoo, laboratory and companion animals.

All tests were not successful, but Corbin and Vandepopuliere created nutritious fish rations that resulted in the raising of better trout in mass production.

"One of the Ralston Purina executives was a trout fishing enthusiast, and after fishing an area stocked with trout raised in hatcheries, discovered the fish had a liver taste as a result of the food they had been fed. He asked us to come up with a better ration that would not leave a taste of liver," Corbin said. "We made nine experimental rations for testing. Eight were complete failures but the ninth was fantastic. That is when we were the first to discover that fish required dietary vitamin C."

Before long, the new fish ration was used in commercial catfish farming, where it allowed producers to build larger ponds and led to a major expansion of the industry, particularly in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

Corbin credits the U of I Department of Animal Sciences' companion animal program, which today includes a number of researchers and teachers, to the committed efforts of the late Donald Eugene "Gene" Becker, "who spent four years trying to entice me to come to the University of Illinois before I finally did." Becker was the former head of the Department of Animal Science (the name before a 1980s merger with Dairy Science).

In nominating Corbin for the Griffin Award, Stan Curtis, U of I professor emeritus of animal sciences, noted that Corbin has "served the laboratory animal care and husbandry community in innumerable ways" by serving on committees that have improved standards of animal care.

And along the way, Corbin also did a good turn for Scotland Yard, the famed British police institution.

"In 1964, Scotland Yard had 200 police dogs, and they used a large kitchen operation to cook food for those dogs every day," said Corbin. "The dogs had resisted efforts to convert them to dry dog food."

Six weeks after Corbin arrived at Scotland Yard and began working with the rations, the canines were happily converted to dry dog food with less cost and better efficiency.

"Jim Corbin has dedicated his professional lifetime -- now over half a century -- to improving the nourishment and care of animals kept by humankind for any and all reasons," said Curtis in the nomination. "Virtually all of the hundreds of millions of animals kept for laboratory, companion and recreational purposes around the world benefit each and every day from Jim Corbin's contributions to improving their state of being."

As other beneficiaries of Corbin's work, Curtis might well have added all the people around the world who have less reason to live in fear of polio. According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, 885 polio cases were reported worldwide in November 2004, and those were confined to six countries. It is expected that the last polio will be eradicated in the United States next year.

For his part, Corbin simply stated, "It's been a life incessantly filled with excitement."

[University of Illinois news release]