Jonas Salk

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonas Salk, the American virologist who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines, was once asked a simple question by the television personality Ed Murrow: who owns the patent? Salk answered, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The man who gave that reply had shown no interest in science as a child. Born in 1914, he trained as a doctor and then decided he never wanted to treat patients. How did he end up testing an experimental vaccine on children? Why did he give his discovery away? And what did the sudden fame that followed take from him?

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• 2. Reluctant Scientist

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  Dora Salk was born in Minsk and emigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Her husband Daniel was born in New Jersey to Jewish immigrant parents. Neither had much formal education. Their son Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, who became a child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens.

  At 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris Hall Prep School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. It crammed a four-year curriculum into three years, and its motto was "study, study, study." Most students dropped out or flunked out. One classmate remembered Salk as a perfectionist who read everything he could find.

  Salk was 15 when he enrolled at the City College of New York, where tuition was free. His biographer David Oshinsky describes the facilities as barely second rate, with no research laboratories. Yet the student body, driven by immigrant parents, produced eight Nobel Prize winners across the 1930s and 1940s. Salk earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. He had hoped to become a lawyer, but his mother urged him toward medicine. Looking back, he told the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."

  New York University School of Medicine had a modest reputation, but its tuition was low and it did not discriminate against Jews. Many nearby schools did, including Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. In 1935, Yale accepted 76 of 501 applicants. Of the 200 Jewish applicants, only five got in. During medical school, Salk worked as a laboratory technician in the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.

  By then he had decided not to practice medicine. After his first year he took a year to study biochemistry, and he was offered a path to a doctorate in that field. He turned it down because he wanted to be of help to humankind in a larger sense than treating one patient at a time. In an elective during his last year, he worked in an influenza laboratory. There he tested whether a virus could be stripped of its power to infect while still teaching the body to defend itself. Careful experiments showed it could.

  In 1941 he spent a two-month elective in the Michigan laboratory of Thomas Francis, who had discovered the type B influenza virus while working for the Rockefeller Foundation. A biographer, Bookchin, says the stint hooked him on virology. After medical school Salk began a residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, again working in Francis's laboratory. He then joined Francis at the University of Michigan School of Public Health on an army-commissioned influenza vaccine. The finished vaccine was widely used at army bases, and Salk isolated one of the strains it contained. In 1947 he wanted a laboratory of his own, and the University of Pittsburgh offered him one.

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• 3. The Pittsburgh Laboratory

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  The laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine disappointed Salk. It was smaller than he had hoped, and he found the university's rules restrictive. He had accepted a professorship there in 1947.

  Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted him in 1948. Weaver asked Salk to find out whether polio came in more types than the three then known. He offered extra space, equipment and researchers. Salk spent his first year gathering supplies and people, including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, Elsie N. Ward and a secretary named Lorraine Friedman. Grants from the Mellon family then helped him build a working virology laboratory. Soon he joined the foundation's polio project, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established.

  Public fear of polio, and heavy publicity about it, sent funding soaring to $67 million by 1955. Even so, most research stayed focused on live vaccines. Albert Sabin was developing an oral vaccine from weakened strains of the virus. Salk chose a killed virus instead, which he believed was the safer course. He would give the next seven years of his life to the problem.

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• 4. The Polio Pioneers

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  On the 2nd of July 1952, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. The setting was the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where the staff assisted him. Tests on laboratory animals had already gone well.

  A few weeks later he injected children at a second institution, a state school. In 1953 he vaccinated his own children. By 1954 he was testing the vaccine on about one million children, who became known as the polio pioneers.

  The effort drew in 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes and 7 million volunteers. The National Foundation allowed itself to go into debt to pay for the final research. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. On the 12th of April 1955, the vaccine was announced as safe. His inactivated polio vaccine came into use that year, and it now appears on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

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• 5. A Gift Without Patent

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  A patent attorney hired by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh reached a blunt verdict. Salk's techniques were not new, so any novelty would lie within an extremely narrow scope and be of doubtful value. Salk himself chose not to patent the vaccine or seek any profit, so that it could spread as widely as possible. One calculation puts its value at $7 billion had it been patented.

  When the result was first made public in April 1955, Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker." A rush to vaccinate began in the United States and abroad. Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium all launched immunization campaigns with his vaccine. By 1959 it had reached about 90 countries.

  Albert Sabin's attenuated live oral vaccine entered commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after Salk's vaccine was released, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States. Salk spent the rest of his life campaigning vigorously for mandatory vaccination, calling the universal vaccination of children a "moral commitment."

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• 6. Fame and Privacy

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  Ed Murrow told the young scientist that he had lost his anonymity, and he was right. Salk had always tried to keep his work and life private, but the attention proved impossible to avoid. Author Jon Cohen wrote that Salk was one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over. Airline pilots announced when he was on board, and passengers burst into applause. Hotels upgraded him to penthouse suites, and a restaurant meal rarely passed without an admirer interrupting.

  The New York Times reported a few months after the announcement that Salk was appalled at the demands on him. At 40, it said, the once obscure scientist had been lifted almost to the level of a folk hero. He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations and letters from thousands of citizens. Yet he kept talking about getting back to his laboratory. In a 1980 interview he said the fame had brought enormous gratification and many burdens. "I am a public figure, no longer one of them," he said of his colleagues.

  Those who met him often found a warm man. The Times described him as speaking quickly and in complete paragraphs. A Washington correspondent said he could sell the Brooklyn Bridge to someone who had never bought anything. The geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him a renaissance scientist. Money, Salk said, belonged in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs, which he thought unnecessary.

  Honors kept arriving. One month after the announcement, Pennsylvania Governor George M. Leader gave him the Meritorious Service Medal, the state's highest award for services. The Lasker Award followed in 1956. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising a country now free of epidemics that once struck almost yearly.

  Salk's private life had its own story. He married Donna Lindsay the day after graduating from medical school in 1939. Her father, Elmer Lindsay, was a wealthy Manhattan dentist who looked down on Salk as a social inferior. He agreed to the wedding on two conditions. Salk had to wait until he could be listed as an M.D. on the invitations, and he had to give himself a middle name. The couple had three sons: Peter, Darrell and Jonathan. They divorced in 1968, and two years later Salk married the French painter Françoise Gilot, formerly the mistress of Pablo Picasso.

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• 7. The Salk Institute

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  In 1963, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies opened in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. Supporters, especially the National Foundation, had helped Salk build his dream of a research complex studying biology from cell to society. The architect Louis Kahn designed the purpose-built facility, and he installed blackboards along the walks in place of concrete facings. Salk explained his motive simply: "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."

  In 1966 Salk described a Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated cultures of science and humanism could cross-fertilize. Journalist Howard Taubman reported hopes there that a single vaccine might one day protect a child against many common infectious diseases. Researchers also speculated about isolating genetic errors that lead to birth defects.

  By 1980 Salk held the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group studied the immunologic aspects of cancer and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. He said the institute might one day matter more than the vaccine, as an example of a creative environment for creative minds. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was a leading professor there until his death in 2004. A 1979 book by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, used the institute as its basis.

  From the mid-1980s Salk turned to a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy. The company could not secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.

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• 8. Biophilosophy

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  In 1966, The New York Times called Salk the "Father of Biophilosophy." He described the idea as applying a biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems. He developed it in two books, Man Unfolding and The Survival of the Wisest. In his definition, a biophilosopher draws on the scriptures of nature and understands that humans have become the evolutionary process itself, through consciousness and the capacity to choose among alternatives.

  In a 1980 interview he predicted a sharp rise and then a leveling off in the human population. He expected human attitudes to shift from fighting death and disease toward being pro-life and pro-health. "We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny," he said.

  At a 1984 meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill, Salk told his cousin Joel Kassiday he was optimistic. He believed ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be found. Society, he said, must be willing to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society."

  On the 23rd of June 1995, Salk died of heart failure at the age of 80 in La Jolla. He was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego. Shortly before, he had been working on a new book on biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind. His personal papers now rest in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. On the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2014, a Google Doodle showed healthy children and adults at play, with two children holding a sign that read "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"

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