Jonas Salk, the Salk Polio Vaccine

Bacteriologist Microbiologist Virologist

Jonas Salk was born October 28, 1914, in New York City to immigrant Orthodox Polish-Jewish parents. Although they lacked any formal education, Salk's parents believed in the value of learning and encouraged his studies. He graduated Townsend Harris High School for Gifted Students at age 15.

Salk entered City College of New York intending to study law, but he did not graduate. Lured by an interest in chemistry, he instead began a career in medical research by attending New York University Medical School. He received his medical degree in 1939.

In 1942, he accepted a fellowship at the University of Michigan School of Public Health working for Dr Thomas Francis, Jr. (chairman from 1941 to 1969). Their research focused on the flu virus, and was funded by the US Army. The influenza virus had killed millions of people following World War I. With the outbreak of World War II, the Army thought it critical that a vaccine be developed to prevent a recurrence of the devastating epidemic.

In 1947, Salk became associate professor of bacteriology and head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He began work on an improved flu vaccine. Then, some of his published research brought him to the attention of the Infantile Paralysis Foundation which provided funding to research a vaccine against polio. Polio, also known as paralytic poliomyelitis, was killing children around the world, by some estimates at the rate of one in 5,000. The urgency to find a cure was immense. Salk and his team conducted eight years of research. A breakthrough by John Enders and his group at Harvard provided a means to grow the polio virus in test tubes, which provided unlimited samples of the virus for testing. Earlier research by Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur showed that immunization using a weak form of a virus could be effective against a stronger form of the virus. Following a different line of thought, Salk built on what he had learned from Dr Francis at the University of Michigan, and used a killed form of the virus. His research showed that injecting the killed virus did not induce the disease; monkeys who received the killed virus produced antibodies which provided immunity from the live virus.

Throughout 1954, Dr Francis conducted the clinical trials of the vaccine. One million US children ages six to nine were vaccinated, some with the vaccine and some with a placebo. The trials were successful. Of the children receiving the polio shot, fewer got the disease.

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