Jonas Salk, who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine, was born on this day in 1914. He was the first in his family to attend college, graduating from the New York University School of Medicine in 1939. After years working in virology, including working on a flu vaccine, he became the leader of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1947. It was there that he would develop a vaccine that would, and continues to, save countless lives.
His team studied polio, which at the time afflicted hundreds of thousands of children a year and caused permanent paralysis in some. They found that for all three of the polio strains infecting patients, a killed version prompted monkeys’ immune systems to produce antibodies. In 1952, he tested his vaccine on a group of children who had recovered from polio and another group who hadn’t ever contracted the disease. Antibodies rose in both.
When the vaccine was released to the public, the U.S. incidence rate dropped from 18 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000 in just a handful of years. Salk decided not to patent the vaccine or cash in on its discovery so it could be distributed as widely as possible. He continued to lead immunization research for decades more, including founding the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego in 1963. Salk died in 1995 at 80 years old.
