Jonas Edward Salk (October 28, 1914-June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines.
He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a miracle worker when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. Less than 25 years later, domestic transmission of polio had been completely eliminated in the United States.
More information: Salk
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a centre for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV.
Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a moral commitment. Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped, and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well.
As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led too much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer killed virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polioviruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953.
In 1954, he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers.
The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system.
More information: History of Vaccines
Polio vaccines are vaccines used to prevent poliomyelitis (polio). Two types are used: an inactivated poliovirus given by injection (IPV) and a weakened poliovirus given by mouth (OPV).
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends all children be fully vaccinated against polio.
The two vaccines have eliminated polio from most of the world, and reduced the number of cases reported each year from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.
The inactivated polio vaccines are very safe. Mild redness or pain may occur at the site of injection. Oral polio vaccines cause about three cases of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis per million doses given. This compares with 5,000 cases per million who are paralysed following a polio infection. Both are generally safe to give during pregnancy and in those who have HIV/AIDS but are otherwise well.
The first successful demonstration of a polio vaccine was by Hilary Koprowski in 1950, with a live attenuated virus which people drank. The vaccine was not approved for use in the United States, but was used successfully elsewhere. An inactivated polio vaccine, developed a few years later by Jonas Salk, came into use in 1955. A different, oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin and came into commercial use in 1961. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
More information: NCBI
Nothing happens quite by chance.
It's a question of accretion of information and experience.
Jonas Edward Salk
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