Salk, Jonas Edward

(b. 28 October 1914 in New York City; d. 23 June 1995 in La Jolla, California), medical researcher who became an international hero on 12 April 1955, when it was announced that he and his staff had developed the first successful vaccine against polio.

The oldest of three sons of Daniel B. Salk and Doris Press was raised in East Harlem in Manhattan, and the Crotona section of the Bronx, then havens for immigrant Jewish families. He graduated from Townsend Harris High School, a selective school for academically talented students. He then received his B.S. degree from the College of the City of New York (1934) and his M.D. degree from the New York University School of Medicine (1939). His father worked as a designer of ladies’ blouses and neckwear.

During a summer spent working at a laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Salk met Donna Lindsay, a graduate of Smith College who was studying at the New York School of Social Work. They were married on 9 June 1939, the day after Salk’s graduation from medical school, and had three sons.

Early in his medical training, Salk, who was slender, soft-spoken, and meticulous, decided he preferred laboratory research to the clinical practice of medicine. During his final year in medical school, he worked in the laboratory of Thomas Francis, Jr., where he first studied the inactivation of influenza virus with ultraviolet light. This was his introduction to the new science of virus research, which was to occupy much of the rest of his career. It was also a confirmation of his conviction, unusual at the time, that it was possible to be immunized against a viral disease without suffering even a mild natural infection.

After his internship at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital (1940–1942), Salk had difficulty finding an acceptable residency or research fellowship, partly because of the anti-Semitism that still pervaded many medical and scientific centers. Eager to find a position that would enable him to continue research during World War II, Salk moved in 1942 to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his mentor Thomas Francis was now leading the University of Michigan’s new School of Public Health.

From 1942 to 1947, under grants from the U.S. Army Epidemiological Board and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Salk worked on the preparation of influenza vaccines; on procedures for measuring the effect of vaccines on individual subjects; and on studies of the effectiveness of mass vaccination against epidemics of influenza A and influenza B. The army’s interest was in finding a way to prevent a recurrence of the deadly influenza pandemic that had killed so many soldiers in 1918, but Salk’s studies also provided the foundation for his subsequent work on developing a vaccine against poliomyelitis and in handling the equally difficult task of showing that such a vaccine had a measurable effect and could be used to control epidemics.

In 1947 Salk left Ann Arbor to direct the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. From his earliest work on influenza at the University of Michigan, much of Salk’s research had been funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes. After he moved to Pittsburgh, Salk became more centrally involved in polio research, first joining several other laboratories around the country in a program to type polio virus samples in order to determine how many strains of the virus existed, and then working to develop a vaccine using inactivated, or “killed,” virus along the same principles of vaccines he had developed for influenza.

A scourge of the twentieth century, polio became an epidemic disease only when advances in hygiene prevented infants from being exposed to the virus, through open sewers and privies, at an age when most could survive infection with few effects because they were still protected by maternal antibodies. Without this early immunizing exposure, people were much more vulnerable to later, more serious infections. After the first large epidemic of 1916, polio swept across the United States and other countries in outbreaks that seemed to strike at random, mainly in the summer and fall. Although fewer than ten percent of victims died, many more were paralyzed, unable to move their arms or legs or to breathe without the help of artificial respirators called “iron lungs.” The most famous polio survivor was Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected president in 1932 despite being paralyzed in 1921 at age thirty-nine. Most of the victims, however, were children.

In 1951 Salk met Basil O’Connor, the autocratic, hard-headed, self-made Wall Street lawyer who was the founding president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Despite the considerable difference in age and background, Salk and O’Connor developed a strong friendship and respect for each other’s talents. O’Connor had taken on the polio cause when his former law partner, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had asked him to manage the therapeutic spa at Warm Springs, Georgia, and he was always more interested in practical results than in the sometimes slow progress of science. By 1953, after a summer of 58,000 cases of polio in the United States, O’Connor was willing to devote millions of National Foundation dollars to producing and testing Salk’s vaccine, even when his scientific advisory panels urged delays.

Between April and July 1954 more than 1.8 million schoolchildren participated in the national field trial of what became known as the Salk polio vaccine. Almost 450,000 children in the first, second, and third grades received vaccines. Another 150,000 received an inert placebo, and 1.2 million children served as observed controls, their health carefully recorded over the next summer to provide data on how their experience differed from those who had been vaccinated. Added to these young volunteers were some 20,000 doctors; 40,000 nurses; 14,000 school principals; 50,000 teachers; and 200,000 lay volunteers whose participation made the Salk vaccine field trial not only the largest ever held, but also the largest nonmilitary mobilization in American history.

The work of evaluating the vaccine took another nine months, in a special Vaccine Evaluation Center led by Thomas Francis, Jr., and staffed with statisticians and epidemiologists on loan from the U.S. Census Bureau and Public Health Service.

On 12 April 1955 Salk returned to Ann Arbor with his family for a large public meeting convened to announce the results. After Francis declared the Salk vaccine safe, effective, and potent, it was immediately licensed for commercial distribution by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This was essentially the first government oversight of what had been a private medical experiment conducted and financed by the March of Dimes, which also spent $9 million to guarantee adequate vaccine supplies in the days just after the announcement. During a live television interview from Ann Arbor (a rarity in the early days of television), journalist Edward R. Murrow asked who owned the patent to the new vaccine. Salk answered, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Salk was immediately swept up in an international flood of publicity, including a trip to the White House to be publicly thanked by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on behalf of all the parents and grandparents of the world. Within weeks, however, the vaccination program was marred by a manufacturing error that left live virus in some vaccine produced by Cutter Laboratories, causing 204 cases of vaccine-associated poliomyelitis, most of them paralytic, as well as eleven deaths. All vaccinations were halted until the problem was identified and corrected. Despite the resulting loss of confidence and momentum, vaccination programs for children resumed by late summer 1955, and by the following year enough vaccine was available for all age groups to get the full series of three shots. By 1960, the year before the introduction of the Sabin vaccine and long before all Americans were vaccinated, cases of paralytic poliomyelitis in the United States dropped from an average of 135 per million people to a rate of twenty-six per million.

Salk’s global celebrity did not endear him to his scientific colleagues, many of whom dismissed the scientific work behind the killed-virus vaccine as “cookbook virology,” or else cast doubts on the long-term effectiveness of any immunization that did not include natural infection. Although Salk received countless scientific, humanitarian, and academic awards over the next forty years, he was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences or awarded the Nobel Prize, two honors that were much discussed in the triumphant period after 1955.

Salk’s chief scientific rival was Albert Sabin (1906–1993), whose polio research was also supported by the National Foundation. Sabin sought an oral vaccine made from weakened, or attenuated, strains of live virus. In the early 1950s he worked tirelessly to postpone and discredit the field trial of the Salk vaccine, although he later served on the committee that recommended licensing in 1955. After a 1959 field trial in the Soviet Union, Sabin’s live-virus oral vaccine was introduced in the United States in 1961, amidst a vast publicity campaign that encouraged all people, including those who had received the Salk vaccine shots, to be revaccinated. Although both men insisted their rivalry was confined to differing convictions about immunology, few failed to notice how galling it was for each that Sabin’s vaccine was the one most commonly used after 1960, while Salk’s name was far more famous.

For the rest of his life, Salk campaigned to reinstate the killed-virus vaccine as the immunization of choice, working to refine the manufacturing process and arguing, with eventual success, that his vaccine was safer and just as effective. In January 2000 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that use of the oral vaccine be phased out and that it be replaced with a version of Salk’s killed-virus vaccine. Thanks to new standards of risk-assessment, even the relatively low number of cases of paralytic polio caused by the Sabin vaccine—approximately ten a year—had become unacceptable.

After the approval of his polio vaccine, Salk had expected to return to research, but he found his career interrupted by the demands of fame and the responsibilities of directing the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a new research center in La Jolla, California, intended to bring together scientists and humanists to share ideas for the greater enhancement of humankind. Financed largely by the March of Dimes, which insisted on naming the center after its most famous grantee, the Salk Institute was founded in 1960 and formally opened in 1963, housed in an imposing group of concrete buildings designed by Louis Kahn on a magnificent site overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The Salks moved to La Jolla in 1960 but were divorced in 1968. On 29 June 1970 Salk married Francoise Gilot, a painter most famous as the former mistress of the artist Pablo Picasso, with whom she already had two children.

After his second marriage, Salk turned to writing to explain his philosophical ideas. In Man Unfolding (1972) and The Survival of the Wisest (1973), Salk theorized that human history was at a turning point when rising population would end and a new kind of wisdom, based on cooperation, would become as essential to human survival as strength or intelligence had been in the past. He also felt that human development could be anticipated by a few exceptionally gifted people who were prepared, intellectually and psychologically, to seize the evolutionary moment and make unique contributions to the progress of humanity. He saw himself as one of these gifted seers and told interviewers, “There have to be people who are ahead of their time, and that is my fate.”

Although Salk maintained a laboratory at the Salk Institute and conducted research in cancer and multiple sclerosis during the late 1960s and 1970s, he was not able to repeat his earlier triumph, and he retired from his laboratory in 1984. Despite a history of heart disease, he returned to virus research in 1987, when he cofounded the Immune Response Corporation to pursue a typically novel approach to managing AIDS. Rather than seeking a vaccine that would prevent the disease, Salk believed that treatment with inactivated HIV could enable those already infected to resist the secondary infections that were most often fatal. He died of heart disease at the age of eighty.

The near-global conquest of polio was a great medical triumph. But the success of Salk’s vaccine was also a turning point in public acceptance of mass programs for medicine and other forms of public welfare, and even for the space program, whose backers often referred to the polio vaccine program as a model for their own massive enterprise. Equally significant, the Salk vaccine inaugurated an era of vaccine research against a host of childhood maladies and created the first generation of children, now parents and grandparents, who had little or no experience with epidemic disease. Salk said in 1995, “what had the most profound effect was the freedom from fear.”

A wealth of material is available in the Jonas Salk Collection, University Library, University of California, San Diego; the Thomas Francis Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; and the March of Dimes archives. Valuable book-length sources include Richard Carter, Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk (1965); John Paul, A History of Poliomyelitis (1971); Jane S. Smith, Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine (1990); and Nina Seavey, Jane S. Smith, and Paul Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear: The Triumph over Polio in America (1998). An obituary is in the New York Times (24 Jun. 1995).

Jane S. Smith