Happy Birthday, Jonas Salk

Discoverer of the Polio vaccine

Jonas Salk was born October 28, 1914, in New York City. He is most well known for his discovery and development of one of the first successful polio vaccines. Salk attended the New York University School of Medicine in 1939 and was the first of his family to attend college. Eventually he went on to be a researcher at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh.

Salk was appointed the director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1947. There he used funding from the National Foundation For Infantile Paralysis, now the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, and began working on the vaccination for polio.

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The scientific opinion at the time was contrary to the what Salk believed in regards to vaccines. He thought that a “killed” polio virus could work to immunize patients without infecting them. To test this he used people who did not have polio, including himself, his wife and children, and a lab scientist, to see if they would develop the disease. None of the test subjects contracted polio.

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The Polio Pioneers, a national testing group of one million children ages six to nine, began in 1954. This resulted in the vaccine being deemed safe and effective. According to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, about 45,000 people in the U.S. had polio two years before the vaccine was widely available. By 1962, only 910 cases were reported.

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One of the things Salk is most praised for is the fact that he did not patent the vaccine or earn money from his discovery. This allowed it to be widely distributed, which therefore is responsible for the high success of the vaccine.

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Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla in 1963. This was his second large triumph during his lifetime. The remainder of Salk’s life was spent trying to figure out a vaccine against AIDS. He died on June 23, 1995 at the age of 80 in La Jolla, CA. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies continues to “make dreams into reality” by seeking new discoveries in neuroscience, genetics, immunology and more, according to their website.