Jonas Salk

Why this Chapter exists

A contribution with a date.

This contribution can be dated to a single announcement: April 12, 1955, when the verdict on the polio vaccine field trial was read to a packed hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and church bells rang across American towns. The vaccine was the work of Jonas Salk (1914–1995) and his laboratory team. Salk grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in New York and was the first member of his family to go to college. He never patented his vaccine, and he earned no money from it. (The foundation’s lawyers had doubted a patent was possible at all, a point historians add beside his famous answer.)

Before 1955

The polio summers.

Poliomyelitis attacked in warm weather, chose children above all, and struck without pattern: most infections passed unnoticed, but some ended in paralysis or death, and no one could say which child, which town, which summer. The worst recorded American year, 1952, brought nearly 58,000 cases, more than 3,000 deaths, and more than 21,000 cases of paralysis, most of them children. Hospital wards filled with iron lungs, the machines that breathed for children whose chest muscles no longer could. Americans of that generation were said to fear polio second only to the atomic bomb. (World Health Organization; the fear comparison is documented in the peer-reviewed literature.)

1947–1955

Pittsburgh, the Pioneers, and the announcement.

Jonas Salk was born in New York City on October 28, 1914, to Daniel and Dora Salk. He went from City College to medical school at New York University and, in 1947, took over a small virus laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Against the prevailing scientific fashion, he pursued a killed-virus vaccine: safe by design, because a properly inactivated virus could not cause the disease it prevented. The March of Dimes, the national polio charity funded by the coins of ordinary families, backed him. He worked with a laboratory team. One member, the microbiologist Julius Youngner, developed a method for growing poliovirus in cell cultures on a large scale and helped work out how to inactivate it. Youngner and his colleagues were not publicly acknowledged in the 1955 celebrations, a point that, Youngner later said, rankled him.

The test of the vaccine was one of the largest field trials in medical history. In 1954, some 1.8 million schoolchildren, remembered as the Polio Pioneers, took part across the country. On April 12, 1955, the trial’s independent evaluator, Thomas Francis Jr. of the University of Michigan, reported the results. The verdict that made front pages worldwide was that the vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent.” It was licensed the same day. Vaccination began within weeks. The rollout carried a tragedy that belongs in the record: defective batches from one manufacturer, in what became known as the Cutter incident, caused about 40,000 cases of polio, most of them mild, paralyzed about 200 children, and killed 10. The disaster led to tighter federal oversight of vaccine production. The campaign continued, and the polio summers began to end. The last case of polio caused by wild virus spreading in the United States came in 1979. (Salk Institute; CDC.)

April 12, 1955

“Could you patent the sun?”

On the evening of the announcement, Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on CBS television and asked who owned the patent on the vaccine. Salk’s answer, preserved on film: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” The vaccine stayed unpatented. Salk spent the rest of his career at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which he founded in 1960. The Institute quotes his saying, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” A second vaccine carried the work further. Albert Sabin, a Jewish immigrant born in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, developed the oral vaccine, licensed in the early 1960s, that carried eradication to much of the world. He and Salk were lifelong rivals, and neither patented his vaccine. Salk died in 1995. Since the global eradication campaign began in 1988, wild polio cases worldwide have fallen by more than 99 percent. (The Murrow exchange, documented in the medical literature; WHO.)

Object Spotlight

An empty iron lung.

Rows of iron lungs once filled hospital wards each summer, each cylinder breathing for a patient, many of them children. Museums, including the Smithsonian, now preserve them as artifacts.

The analytical question

What the refusal teaches.

Salk, a public-school graduate and the first in his immigrant family to reach college, led the work, declined to patent the result, and stated his reason when asked. Jewish tradition has a phrase, tikkun olam, “the repair of the world.” How much any tradition explains one person’s choices is an open question.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• US History: the polio era, the March of Dimes as mass philanthropy, and the 1955 announcement as a national event.
• Biology & Public Health: killed-virus versus live-virus vaccines, field trials, and eradication campaigns from 1955 to the present.
• Ethics: the patent refusal, public funding, and who owns publicly financed discoveries.
• Jewish History: the immigrant arc from the Russian Empire to the laboratory.
• Media Literacy: the Murrow interview as a primary source preserved on film.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.9 (Globalization and a Changing Global Environment, including 10.9a, the causes and effects of, and responses to, an infectious disease) and NY US History 11.10 (Social and Economic Change/Domestic Issues, 1945–Present).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.2 (central ideas from primary and secondary sources) and RST.9–10.9 (comparing scientific accounts).

Further Teaching Resources

• Salk Institute, the founder’s biography, from the institution he built.
• WHO, the history of polio vaccination, the global arc from 1955 to near-eradication.
• Eisenhower Presidential Library, the government’s own 1955 documents.