Even as recent as six decades ago, poliomyelitis was a dreaded, infectious and potentially fatal disease that paralysed its victims. Today, a few drops of the vaccine in an infant’s mouth, is all that is required to ward off this malaise. Perhaps, you have seen a child or two with a limp and feet strapped to callipers? Yes, they might have suffered from a polio attack when still very young.
Jonas Salk is the American medical researcher and virologist who discovered and developed the first successful polio vaccine in 1952. May 6 is designated as Jonas Salk day. He was born in New York in 1914 to Daniel, son of Jewish immigrants who came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe.
In high school, Salk was known for being a perfectionist and an avid reader, reading everything he could lay his hands on.
He went to New York University School of Medicine. His heart was in medical research, and so did not opt to be a practising doctor after getting the medical degree. Initially, he was rejected by many labs, maybe because of his Jewish background. In 1939, he interned as a physician scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital. He received a fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he took up studying flu viruses.
Hard times
There was an epidemic in the U.S., and even the nation’s then President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was affected by polio. In 1947, Salk accepted an appointment to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The next year, he began working on a project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis founded by Roosevelt, to find the number of different types of polio virus. Salk saw an opportunity to extend this project towards developing a vaccine against polio, and devoted himself to this work for the next seven years.
In the early 1950s, Salk tested the polio vaccine first on himself, his wife Donna and their three sons in their kitchen, using syringes he had sterilised by boiling in water on the stove.
Progress
By June 1954, 1.8 million children and adults, called polio pioneers, volunteered to be injected with Salk’s vaccine in a double blind trial —making it one of the largest clinical trials in medical history.
When news of the vaccine’s success hit the headlines on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed a “miracle worker”. Around the world, an immediate rush to vaccinate began, with countries including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium planning to begin polio immunisation campaigns using Salk’s vaccine.
The Salk vaccine was later replaced with a live virus vaccine developed by Albert Sabin, as it was less expensive and easier to use.Salk started the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he recruited Nobel Prize-winning scientists to find a cure for cancer, AIDS, and diabetes. The 70 s and 80 s saw him writing books about science, philosophy, and mankind. He died in 1995 at the age of 81.
