Jonas Salk

Summers were not carefree, fun times for kids in the 1950s. Instead, the warm weather brought the fear of the return of a deadly epidemic of poliomyelitis, known as polio. The disease left victims, mostly children, unable to move parts of their bodies, sometimes even paralyzing their lungs so that they needed a machine to help them breathe. The nation was desperate for a cure.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a victim of the disease as an adult, announced the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (today known as the March of Dimes Foundation) to fund polio research. A young doctor named Jonas Salk was one of the scientists whose work was supported by the foundation.

Salk went to work researching the polio virus and creating a polio vaccine. While some vaccines are made using a “live” version of the virus, Salk’s vaccine used a “killed” version, which didn’t carry the risk of infecting the patient with the disease from which it was designed to protect them.

Once Salk created the vaccine, he tested it on laboratory animals. He then used himself, his wife, and his three sons as human guinea pigs. Finally, on April 12, 1955, the vaccine was declared to be safe and effective. Polio was vanquished and Dr. Jonas Salk became a household name.

Salk had spent two and a half years, 16 hours a day, seven days a week working on the vaccine, but he refused to patent it. He felt that the vaccine should be spread among the population as quickly as possible, and the patent process would have slowed that down. He had no desire to profit personally from his work.

In 1997, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded in Salk’s honor. The citation read: “Because of [Dr. Jonas Salk’s] tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk’s true honors and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express out gratitude and our deepest thanks.” Hear, hear!