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Jonas Salk

1914–1995 · 81 years Tier I

His father-in-law made him invent a middle name before the wedding

Portrait of Jonas Salk — SAS Scandinavian Airlines — 1959-05-28 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

His mother came from Minsk at 12 and neither parent had much schooling. He went into Townsend Harris at 13, a school for gifted boys that packed four years into three and failed most of them, and into City College at 15, where tuition was free. He wanted law. His mother pointed him at medicine. He chose New York University because it had no Jewish quota. Yale that year took five Jews out of 200 applicants. He decided in school that he did not want patients. The day after he graduated in 1939 he married Donna Lindsay, whose father, a Manhattan dentist, thought him a social inferior and consented on two conditions: that the invitations say M.D., and that he give himself a middle name. He became Jonas Edward Salk.

He learned the method before he had a use for it. Working under Thomas Francis at Michigan on an Army contract, he killed influenza virus with formalin and showed that the dead virus still immunized. In 1947 he took a cramped laboratory at Pittsburgh. In 1948 a foundation paid him to count the types of poliovirus, and he spent the next seven years building a killed-virus vaccine the same way. The field trial, the announcement of April 12, 1955, the church bells and the patent nobody filed are BriefHistory's subject. What that morning did to the man is this one.

Within weeks the vaccine started paralyzing children. Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley shipped lots that had passed the required safety tests and still carried live virus — about 120,000 doses. The counts differ: one tally puts it at 56 paralytic cases and five deaths among the children vaccinated, another, counting the people they went on to infect, at hundreds paralyzed and 10 dead. Federal inspectors found nothing wrong with Cutter's methods, and a jury later found the company not negligent but liable anyway. The fame arrived at the same time and never left. Ed Murrow told him that a great tragedy had befallen him, that he had lost his anonymity. Pilots announced him to their passengers. Twenty-five years on he said he had become a public figure and was no longer one of his colleagues.

He spent the rest of his life building the place he wished had existed. The Salk Institute opened at La Jolla in 1963 in a building by Louis Kahn, who set blackboards into the walls along the walkways so that arguments could be finished outdoors. Salk called what he wanted there a Socratic academy where science and the humanities would cross. He collected the Lasker, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1975 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and never a Nobel Prize. He died of heart failure on June 23, 1995, at La Jolla, and is buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego. The vaccine is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Jonas Salk's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Inactivated polio vaccine discovery
Killed virus, injected. Never patented, and still on the WHO essential medicines list. 1955
Salk Institute for Biological Studies company
La Jolla, California, in a building by Louis Kahn 1963
Man Unfolding book
The first of the biophilosophy books 1972
The Survival of the Wisest book 1973
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality book
Written with his son Jonathan 1981
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason book 1983

Life in brief

with age at each point

1934 aged ~20 Takes a chemistry degree at City College of New York He had entered at 15, having skipped grades.
1939 aged ~25 Graduates in medicine and marries Donna Lindsay the next day Her father set the terms, one of which was a middle name.
1941 aged ~27 Works two months in Thomas Francis's virus laboratory at Michigan The influenza vaccine work that taught him the killed-virus method.
1947 aged ~33 Gets his own laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh It was smaller than he had hoped and the rules irritated him.
1952 aged ~38 Begins human trials of the polio vaccine
April 12, 1955 aged 40 The field trial results are announced as safe and effective
April 27, 1955 aged 40 Cutter Laboratories withdraws its vaccine after paralysis is reported Roughly 120,000 doses carried live virus. Accounts of the toll differ.
1963 aged ~49 The Salk Institute opens at La Jolla
June 23, 1995 aged 80 Dies of heart failure at 80