collaboration across Boston, Toronto, New York, and Oxford. It was effectively "a major military operation at the Labs", orchestrated with an eye to the "D-Day" landings in occupied France in June 1944. Trial and expansion of the polio vaccine: 1946-1960s Throughout the first half of the 20th century, polio outbreaks grew larger and more severe as the disease struck most provinces from west to east. In 1953, Canada’s worst polio epidemic year, a total of almost 9,000 cases had claimed the lives of 494 people across the country. In 1946, Robert Defries, Director of Connaught Laboratories, began an initiative to tackle the growing polio problem. To reflect the institution's expanding scope of virology research, Connaught was renamed "Connaught Medical Research Laboratories". The initiative benefitted from a surge in available polio research funding, particularly from the United States where Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal polio experience had led to the establishment of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), later renamed March of Dimes. First recruited to the polio initiative were Clennel van Rooyen and Andrew J. Rhodes. Following an especially severe epidemic that struck the Inuit community of igluligaarjuk in the Northwest Territories, the Labs' Arctic investigations revealed that the polio had very little to do with geography or a summer "polio season", factors that had been thought to affect transmissibility of the disease. In 1949, researchers at Connaught discovered a purely synthetic blend of 60 ingredients that efficiently fed the cells required to cultivate viruses. They named it "Medium 199", having hit upon the mix after 198 attempts and more than two years or experimentation. In November 1951, the Medium 199 team supplied the poliovirus research team with a sample that effectively resolved the roadblocks that poliovirus research had run into in cultivating the poliovirus. News of the success reached Jonas Salk in Pittsburgh, who upon receiving the supply of Medium 199 was able to prepare a small supply of the polio vaccine for its first human use. Meanwhile, Leone N. Farrell, also a researcher at Connaught and one of the few women to earn a Ph.D. in the sciences in the first half of the twentieth century, led progress in large-scale production methods. In early July 1953, National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis sponsored a mass field trial across 44 U.S. States, Canada, and Helsinki, Finland. Connaught became responsible for the field trial supply of bulk poliovirus fluids, and shipped