Salk, Jonas

Salk, Jonas (1914–1995), virologist and developer of the first successful polio vaccine.Born in New York to immigrant parents, Jonas Salk received his B.A. from the City College of New York in 1934 and his M.D. from New York University's College of Medicine in 1939. He conducted virus research at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh. Salk became an international hero at forty when he and his associates developed a vaccine against poliomyelitis, a viral disease that had paralyzed hundreds of thousands of victims, mostly children, in mysterious and terrifying epidemics that swept the industrialized world in the first half of the twentieth century. Traditional theory held that immunity to virus diseases came only from actual infection, but Salk showed that a vaccine made from killed‐virus particles could spur immunity without danger. His vaccine was tested on 1.8 million school children in 1954 in a massive field trial sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (“March of Dimes”), and received a federal license the following year. Although an early batch of faulty vaccine caused several cases of paralysis, polio incidences dropped by 80 percent after two years in areas where Salk's vaccine was used. Still, many scientists dismissed his work as “cook‐book biology,” and Salk was never honored in any way by his peers. After 1960, Salk's vaccine (but not his fame) was overshadowed by Albert Sabin's live‐virus oral polio vaccine; since 1 January 2000, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended a return to the injected polio vaccine and the elimination of live‐virus oral vaccine use. In 1963, Salk became founding director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His later research sought vaccines to fight cancer and to boost immune system activity after HIV infection. He married twice and had three sons.
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Disease; Medicine: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Richard Carter , Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk, 1966.
Jane S. Smith , Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, 1990.

Jane S. Smith