It was September 1952, and eight-year-old Anna told her mother she wasn’t feeling well. When the little girl came home from school, her right leg was dragging and she had a horrible headache. By that evening, Anna’s legs were paralyzed, and she couldn’t lift her head off her pillow. Anna had polio, also known as infantile paralysis, an infectious disease that primarily affects children. Polio is caused by a virus which attacks the nerve cells that control the muscles in the body, resulting in loss of movement and sometimes even death. But only a few years after Anna got sick, Jonas Salk, an American physician and medical scientist, became the first person to create a vaccine to prevent polio.
Son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914, in New York City. Two years later, America was experiencing the worst polio epidemic in the country’s history, and Salk’s parents, both factory workers, were frightened for their little boy. In 1916, there were nine thousand polio cases in New York City, and people were in a panic. Cardboard signs bearing the words "INFANTILE PARALYSIS" started appearing on the doors of apartments and houses in the city. The signs warned everyone not to go in or come out, by order of the board of health. Thousands of people fled the city, and those that couldn’t kept their children inside.
As a child, Salk preferred to stay home and read, rather than go outside to play with friends. He attended Townsend Harris High School, a school for gifted children, and graduated at age 15. At first, he wanted to pursue a law career, but after he took some biology courses at college, he decided to become a physician instead. Later, Jonas Salk became interested in viruses—tiny organisms that replicate themselves inside living things and cause infections, such as polio.
In 1942, when Salk was in his last year of medical school at New York University College of Medicine, his work on the recently discovered influenza virus led him to a new idea about vaccines. Vaccines are preventive medicines made from a substance containing a form of the germs (in this case, viruses) that cause a particular disease. When this substance is injected into the human body, antibodies are produced that fight the virus and create immunity to the disease caused by that virus.Traditionally, vaccines were made from live forms of a particular virus because scientists believed that only live viruses could create antibodies. Unfortunately, in some cases, the live-virus vaccine did not create immunity or prevent the disease—it caused the disease. This fact concerned Salk. He said, "I just questioned the logic of it, the reasonableness of it, when other people accepted it." Salk’s idea was to use a killed virus instead, which could never cause the disease. Although Salk was confident his approach would work, most scientists did not agree with him.
After graduation from medical school, Salk joined a research team headed by a former professor and mentor, who also believed in using killed-virus vaccines. The team developed a successful, killed-virus flu vaccine that was administered to soldiers during World War II. In 1947, Salk left his mentor to become the head of the virus-research lab at the University of Pittsburgh. The next year, he was asked to assist with a project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (also called the March of Dimes), an organization founded in 1938 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself a polio victim. Then, people contributed to the March of Dimes campaign by sending their dimes to the White House to help fight polio, which affected about fifty thousand Americans each year.
By 1950, Salk was deeply involved in the development of a vaccine to conquer polio. As an experiment, he injected the killed virus into monkeys to see if the vaccine was safe and would trigger the production of antibodies. His experiment was a success. Next, in September 1952, Salk vaccinated children who already suffered from polio to determine if the number of antibodies within their bodies could be increased. The answer was yes, and Salk later said, "That was the first evidence that we were able to do in humans what we could do in animals." Salk was convinced the vaccine would be safe and effective, but more testing was needed to be sure.
Unfortunately, the press learned of Salk’s early success with the vaccine, and in 1953, headlines falsely proclaimed that a polio vaccine would soon be available to the public. The country reacted with such joy that Salk felt he needed to clear up the misunderstanding. Salk appeared on a radio program to explain the actual situation. He said, "Although progress has been more rapid than we had any right to expect, there will be no vaccine available . . . for the next polio season." The scientific community saw Salk’s radio appearance as a publicity stunt. One scientist said, "Jonas went on the air that night to take a bow and become a public hero." In addition, despite Salk’s successful polio vaccine experiments, most scientists still doubted a killed-virus vaccine could be effective.
During this time, an older and better-known scientist, Albert Sabin, was working on a live-virus polio vaccine, and the competition between the two men was fierce. After Salk’s radio appearance, Sabin constantly belittled his rival in public, but the criticism didn’t stop Salk’s research. On April 12, 1955, an announcement was made that Salk’s polio vaccine was finally ready, and Salk was hailed all over the world. In the next four years, over 450 million doses of Salk’s vaccine were given to children. But the controversy over which vaccine was best did not end, because the Sabin vaccine, which came out a few years later, had some advantages over the Salk vaccine.
Sabin’s vaccine did not need refrigeration and could be administered orally on a sugar cube. Since this vaccine, unlike Salk’s, did not have to be injected, it could be given by nonmedical personnel, making it suitable for use in remote communities around the world. So, in 1961, Albert Sabin’s live-virus vaccine was approved for wide use in the United States and was provided free to all American schoolchildren.
Even though Jonas Salk was the first researcher to develop the polio vaccine, he never sought a patent for his discovery and never made money from it. When a television newsman asked him, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk said simply, "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Although Salk did not receive science’s greatest honor, the Nobel Prize, partly because of his problems with the scientific community, he was awarded America’s two highest civilian honors: the Congressional Gold Medal in 1955 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
In 1963, Jonas Salk realized a dream when he opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a place for other scientists to conduct research and teach. In 1990, Salk and the institute began work on a vaccine for AIDS. After Salk’s death of heart failure on June 23, 1995, Dr. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, said of Jonas Salk, "Few have made one discovery that has benefited humanity so greatly."
Jonas Salk became known as "The Man Who Saved the Children," because he prevented so many children from falling victim to this crippling disease. In 2001, there were only 483 reported cases of polio globally, but scientists remain vigilant as efforts continue to create a polio-free world.