THE THOMAS FRANCIS, JR. MEDAL IN GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH

A Brief History of Polio

Jonas Salk, MD
1914-1995

Jonas Salk was born in New York City in 1914. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants and Jonas was the first member of his family to attend college. He entered the City College of New York intending to study law, but soon found that he was more intrigued by medical science.

While attending medical school at New York University, Salk spent a year researching influenza. The virus that causes flu had only recently been discovered and the young Salk was eager to learn if the virus could stripped of its ability to infect, while still providing protection from the illness. It was also at NYU that Salk first encountered Thomas Francis, Jr., the man who would later play such a major role in Salk’s most famous work: a vaccine for the dreaded crippler, polio.

In 1942, Salk came to the University of Michigan on a research fellowship, and soon advanced to the position of assistant professor of epidemiology. It was at Michigan that he was reunited with his old friend and mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., who had been recruited to become head of the epidemiology department at the newly formed School of Public Health.

In 1947, Salk accepted an appointment to the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. While working there, with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Salk saw an opportunity to develop a vaccine against polio, and devoted himself to this work for the next eight years.

Salk’s vaccine was composed of “killed” polio virus, which retained the ability to immunize without running the risk of infecting the patient. This idea of using killed virus to make a vaccine was relatively new, having been pioneered by Thomas Francis for the first influenza vaccine. Some scientists were of the opinion that it would never work against polio.

But work it did, and in 1955 Salk’s years of research paid off. Human trials of the polio vaccine effectively protected subjects from the polio virus. When news of the discovery was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a miracle worker.

In 1963, armed with a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation and support from the March of Dimes, Salk founded the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA. His last years were spent searching for a vaccine against AIDS. He died on June 23, 1995 at 80 years of age.