A garment worker’s son
Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914, in New York City, the eldest of three sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father, Daniel, worked in the garment district designing lace collars and cuffs; the family had little money and moved between modest apartments in East Harlem and the Bronx. His mother, Dora, who had come from Russia as a child and been given little schooling herself, was fiercely determined that her sons would have more. Jonas was a serious, bookish boy “a most unusual child,” his mother said, one drawn more to ideas than to play. He entered Townsend Harris, a demanding public high school for gifted students, at a young age, and went on to the City College of New York, the tuition-free college that educated a generation of poor and immigrant New Yorkers. He had at first imagined becoming a lawyer; family lore holds that it was his mother who talked him out of it. He turned instead to medicine, and to a question that would define his life: not how to cure the sick, but how to keep people from falling ill at all.
The choice of prevention
At New York University’s medical school, Salk made a choice that puzzled his classmates. A newly qualified physician was expected to practise medicine and treat patients; Salk wanted to do research, working at the level of prevention rather than cure. During his training he was drawn to the study of viruses and the emerging science of vaccines, and he took the then-controversial view that a vaccine might be made from virus that had been killed rather than merely weakened. After an internship he joined the laboratory of Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan, where the two developed an influenza vaccine for the U.S. Army using exactly that killed-virus approach. In 1947 Salk was offered his own laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, unglamorous and underfunded, in the basement of a municipal hospital, but his. When the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known through its fundraising arm the March of Dimes, went looking for researchers to take on polio, Salk volunteered.
America in the grip of polio
It is hard now to recover how terrifying polio was. Poliomyelitis is a virus that, in a small fraction of those it infects, attacks the nervous system and causes paralysis, often of the legs, sometimes of the muscles needed to breathe. It struck mostly children, and it struck in summer, without warning or pattern. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, American epidemics paralysed or killed tens of thousands every year; 1952 alone saw some 58,000 cases. Parents kept their children away from swimming pools, cinemas, and birthday parties. Newsreels showed wards of children sealed into iron lungs, coffin-like machines that breathed for those whose chest muscles no longer could. President Franklin Roosevelt, himself paralysed by what was long believed to be polio, had helped found the March of Dimes, which gathered coins from millions of ordinary Americans. There was no defence and no cure. A vaccine was the only hope, and the public was at once desperate for one and frightened of the prospect.
Building the vaccine
Salk and his Pittsburgh team spent years on painstaking groundwork: establishing that there were three distinct types of poliovirus, all of which a vaccine would need to cover, and learning to grow the virus in quantity, work made possible by John Enders’s discovery of how to culture poliovirus in ordinary tissue. Salk then had to kill the virus with formaldehyde thoroughly enough that it could not cause disease, yet gently enough that it still provoked protective immunity. Many scientists were sceptical; the dominant view, championed by the virologist Albert Sabin, held that only a live, weakened virus could confer lasting protection. Salk pressed on. By 1952 he had a candidate vaccine, and he began testing it, first on children already disabled by polio, then on volunteers, and then, in a decision that has become famous, on himself, his wife Donna, and their three young sons, vaccinating his family at home. The early results showed a sharp rise in protective antibodies, and no harm.
The Polio Pioneers
To prove the vaccine worked, it had to be tested at a scale never before attempted. In 1954 the March of Dimes organised a field trial of staggering size: roughly 1.8 million American schoolchildren took part, the youngest known as the “Polio Pioneers,” many proudly wearing buttons and receiving certificates. It was a feat of civic organisation as much as of science, deliberately run by Salk’s old mentor Thomas Francis to keep the evaluation independent. The nation waited. On April 12, 1955, a date chosen as the tenth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, Francis announced the results at the University of Michigan, to a room of reporters and a live national broadcast: the vaccine was safe, effective, and potent. Church bells rang. Factory whistles blew. Strangers wept and embraced in the street. Salk, at forty, became overnight one of the most famous and beloved people in America, a status he found genuinely uncomfortable, and which strained his relations with fellow scientists who felt the credit belonged to an entire field.
“Could you patent the sun?”
Days after the announcement, the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on television and asked the question on many minds: who owned the patent on the vaccine? Salk’s answer became one of the most quoted lines in the history of medicine. “Well, the people, I would say,” he replied. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Whether a patent could in fact have been secured, lawyers have argued the point ever since, Salk’s meaning was unmistakable: he did not regard the vaccine as his property. Forbes magazine later estimated that patent royalties could have been worth some $7 billion to him. He took none of it. The decision carried a concrete consequence beyond the symbolic one: with no patent and no licensing fees, the vaccine could be manufactured by many makers, distributed widely, and supplied to countries that could never have afforded a proprietary version. Salk had decided, in effect, that a defence against a children’s disease belonged to every child.
What the vaccine ended
The effect was swift and overwhelming. In the United States, annual polio cases fell from tens of thousands to a few hundred within a decade, and then to a handful. Albert Sabin’s live oral vaccine, developed soon after and given as drops on a sugar cube, proved cheap and easy to administer to vast numbers and carried the fight into the developing world. Together the two vaccines made global eradication conceivable. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, launched in 1988, has since reduced wild poliovirus by more than 99 percent; it estimates that some 20 million people are walking today who would otherwise have been paralysed, and that more than 1.5 million childhood deaths have been averted. A disease that had defined the anxieties of the twentieth-century summer is now, for almost every child alive, something found only in history books. It stands as one of the clearest cases in modern history of science, public funding, and mass civic participation combining to lift a specific fear from humanity entirely.
The weight of fame
Salk’s sudden celebrity came at a cost he never fully reconciled. Much of the scientific establishment regarded the killed-virus vaccine as competent application rather than original genius, and resented the adulation heaped on one man for what had been the work of many laboratories and a vast public effort. Salk was never elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a slight that stung for the rest of his life. He, in turn, found the fame intrusive and faintly absurd; he had wanted to be a scientist, not a saint. Yet he also came to believe that a researcher held a duty to the public that funded the work, and he wrote and spoke for general audiences with unusual seriousness. In his later years he developed what he called a philosophy of being “a good ancestor” the idea that each generation holds an obligation to those not yet born. It was, in a sense, the same instinct that had drawn him to prevention over cure, now extended into a way of seeing the whole human project.
The Salk Institute and legacy
Salk could have spent the rest of his career trading on his fame. Instead he turned to building. In 1960 he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, conceiving it as a place where biologists could pursue fundamental research alongside thinkers from other fields, free of bureaucracy. He chose the architect Louis Kahn, and together they created one of the most admired buildings of the twentieth century, twin laboratory blocks framing a travertine courtyard open to the Pacific, with a single channel of water running toward the horizon. The institute became, and remains, one of the world’s foremost centres of biomedical research, home to multiple Nobel laureates. Salk himself spent his later years working on the immune system and, in his final decade, on the search for an AIDS vaccine. He died in La Jolla on June 23, 1995, at eighty. He had said that the truest measure of a life was whether one had been “a good ancestor.” By that standard, few have ever done better.
Sources & further reading
Jonas Salk, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.