Dr. Jonas Salk
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2020-10-06T14:28:50-07:00
In October of 1914 Jonas Salk, pioneer of the polio vaccine, was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City.
The first of his family to study at university, Jonas Salk was at first interested in law. However, his mother convinced him to switch from pre-law to pre-med by telling him he could never be a lawyer... because he could not win an argument against her. In 1942, after graduating college, Jonas Salk went on to work under Dr. Thomas Francis in the department of epidemiology at University of Michigan.
During Salk’s fellowship the two doctors worked on the creation of an influenza vaccine for the US military, using inactive or killed virus. This was not a widely accepted approach at the time (most vaccines were made using live virus), but it would soon become prolific through the work of Dr. Salk.
After he completed this fellowship with Dr. Francis, Dr. Salk moved to Pittsburgh and in 1947 became director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Virus Research Laboratory. In 1949, Dr. Salk shifted his focus to polio when he received a contract from the March of Dimes Foundation to identify different strains of polio virus. Using a tissue culture method of growing the virus, developed in 1949 by John Enders, Frederick Robbins, and Thomas Weller at Harvard University, and again disregarding convention by using the same inactive virus approach, Dr. Salk designed the polio vaccine. Some of the earliest volunteers to test the vaccine were Salk, his then wife, and their children, before proceeding to a national study of more than a million people.
In April of 1955, in a pivotal moment in medical history and in the life of Dr. Jonas Salk, the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective.
