Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk: The Man Who Would Not Patent the Sun

On 12 April 1955, in an auditorium at the University of Michigan, Thomas Francis Jr. told the world that the vaccine his former student had made was safe, potent, and ninety per cent effective against paralytic poliomyelitis. Church bells rang. The disease that had been closing swimming pools and filling iron lungs every summer had been beaten by a man of forty who had never run a laboratory before 1947 — and who then declined to patent what he had made.

A New York Beginning

Jonas Edward Salk was born in New York City on 28 October 1914, the eldest of three sons of Daniel and Dora Salk, Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was the first in the family to go to college. He finished high school at fifteen, took a science degree at City College of New York in 1933, and earned his MD from New York University School of Medicine in 1939, interning afterwards at Mount Sinai Hospital.

He was unusual among his classmates in not wanting to practise medicine. What interested him was the laboratory, and specifically the question of how to make a body defend itself against a virus it had never met.

The Michigan Apprenticeship

In 1942 a research fellowship took him to the University of Michigan and to Thomas Francis Jr., the head of epidemiology there, who taught him the methodology of vaccine development. It was the formative relationship of his career. With U.S. Army support the two spent six years on influenza, and in 1943 produced a killed-virus vaccine — influenza strains inactivated with formalin, dead enough to be harmless and intact enough to provoke antibodies.

That principle became Salk's conviction, and eventually his heresy.

Pittsburgh and the Heresy

In 1947 he was given the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis brought him into its programme to type the poliovirus — slow, unglamorous cataloguing work that gave him an intimate knowledge of the enemy.

He then proposed doing for polio what he had done for influenza. Prevailing scientific opinion held that a killed-virus polio vaccine was too risky and, worse, would not confer lasting immunity; the field's weight sat behind a weakened live virus, the approach championed by Albert Sabin. Salk grew poliovirus in quantity on monkey kidney cell cultures and killed it with formaldehyde. Testing began in 1952 on children who had already been infected, and antibody levels rose sharply. He injected himself and his own family. They produced antibodies and had no adverse reactions.

Two Million Children

The 1954 field trial, sponsored by the National Foundation, remains among the largest medical experiments ever conducted — accounts put the enrolment between one and nearly two million schoolchildren aged six to nine, the "Polio Pioneers." Francis, his old teacher, ran the evaluation, which was the point: the verdict would not come from the man with something to prove.

It came on 12 April 1955, and it was yes. Salk never patented the vaccine and never earned anything from it, preferring that it be distributed as widely as possible.

The Cold Shoulder

Public adoration and professional resentment arrived together. Salk did not win the Nobel Prize. He was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Colleagues regarded him as a publicity hound, a scientist who had become a celebrity, and the animosity never entirely lifted.

The argument with Sabin outlived them both, and history has been kinder to Salk than his contemporaries were. Salk maintained that his killed vaccine gave equivalent protection with no risk of causing paralysis; evidence later showed that the live vaccine could, rarely, do exactly that. Federal advisory panels recommended a return to the killed vaccine in 1999 and again in 2009, on the grounds that it cannot accidentally cause polio.

Why Jonas Is Called a Genius

The quality here is not conceptual originality. It is judgement under pressure and the nerve to hold a minority position against the consensus of an entire field. The killed-virus principle was not Salk's discovery — he learned it from Thomas Francis and applied it, from influenza to polio, in the face of expert opinion that it would not work. What he supplied was the willingness to be wrong in public, the methodological care to grow and inactivate virus reliably at scale, and the moral clarity to inject his own children before anyone else's.

The counter-case is serious and was made loudly at the time. Salk invented no new science; the poliovirus typing was foundation-funded programme work, and the vaccine was an engineering achievement built on other people's principles. The scientific establishment withheld its two highest verdicts — no Nobel, no National Academy — and the reason was not only jealousy of his fame; peers genuinely felt the credit was distributed wrongly. His remaining four decades produced nothing comparable: work on multiple sclerosis, cancer, and finally a killed-virus AIDS vaccine that did not succeed. The honest summary is that Salk was a superb applied scientist and an exceptional organiser of a hard practical problem, celebrated by the public as a genius partly because the thing he solved was one that frightened every parent in America. That the acclaim outran the originality does not make the achievement smaller. Roughly speaking, he ended a plague.

Legacy

In 1963 he opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, built with a $20 million National Science Foundation grant and March of Dimes backing — an institution designed to give researchers the freedom he felt he had been denied. He worked there until his death on 23 June 1995, aged eighty.

His monument is negative: the absence of the summer terror, the closed wards, the machines that breathed for children. He gave the thing away, and the decision has become the most quoted fact about him — more famous, now, than the chemistry that made it possible.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1977
• Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award — 1956
• California Hall of Fame — 2007
• Affiliated with University of Pittsburgh
• Educated at University of Michigan, City College of New York and New York University
• Worked as physician, epidemiologist and inventor