8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine - History in the Headlines 8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine October 28, 2014 By Christopher Klein Jonas Salk in his lab, Share this: 8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine Author 8 Things You May Not Know About Jonas Salk and the Polio Vaccine URL Google For six decades after the first major American polio epidemic occurred near Rutland, Vermont, in the summer of 1894, the highly contagious disease terrorized the United States. Polio, which struck children disproportionately, could attack the central nervous system and cause muscle deterioration, paralysis and even death. In 1953, American virologist Jonas Salk announced the development of the world’s first safe and effective polio vaccine. Explore eight surprising facts about the vaccine that has nearly eradicated the most dreaded disease of the 20th century. Although polio was the most feared disease of the 20th century, it was hardly the deadliest.

“Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his Pulitzer Prize winning book “Polio: An American Story.” During those decades, 10 times as many children died in accidents and three times as many succumbed to cancer. Oshinsky notes that polio inspired such fear because it struck without warning and researchers were unsure of how it spread from person to person. In the years following World War II, polls found the only thing Americans feared more than polio was nuclear war. Franklin D. Roosevelt proved instrumental in the vaccine’s development. A year after his nomination as a Democratic vice presidential candidate, rising political star Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio while vacationing at his summer home on Campobello Island in 1921. The disease left the legs of the 39-year-old future president permanently paralyzed. In 1938, five years after entering the White House, Roosevelt helped to create the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, which became the primary funding source for Salk’s vaccine trials.

Employing “poster children” and enlisting the star power of celebrities from Mickey Rooney to Mickey Mouse, the grassroots organization run by Roosevelt’s former Wall Street law partner Basil O’Connor was raising more than $20 million per year by the late 1940s. Salk challenged prevailing scientific orthodoxy in his vaccine development. Elvis Presley makes an appearance in support of the March of Dimes, 1950s. While most scientists believed that effective vaccines could only be developed with live viruses, Salk developed a “killed-virus” vaccine by growing samples of the virus and then deactivating them by adding formaldehyde so that they could no longer reproduce. By injecting the benign strains into the bloodstream, the vaccine tricked the immune system into manufacturing protective antibodies without the need to introduce a weakened form of the virus into healthy patients. Many researchers such as Polish-born virologist Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral “live-virus” polio vaccine, called Salk’s approach dangerous.

Sabin even belittled Salk as “a mere kitchen chemist.” The hard-charging O’Connor, however, had grown impatient at the time-consuming process of developing a live-virus vaccine and put the resources of the March of Dimes behind Salk. Salk tested the vaccine on himself and his family. After successfully inoculating thousands of monkeys, Salk began the risky step of testing the vaccine on humans in 1952. In addition to administering the vaccine to children at two Pittsburgh-area institutions, Salk injected himself, his wife and his three sons in his kitchen after boiling the needles and syringes on his stovetop. Salk announced the success of the initial human tests to a national radio audience on March 26, 1953. The clinical trial was the biggest public health experiment in American history. Salk inoculating a patient (Credit: Al Fenn/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) On April 26, 1954, six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia.

By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.” For the first time, researchers used the double-blind method, now standard, in which neither the patient nor person administering the inoculation knew if it was a vaccine or placebo. Although no one was certain that the vaccine was perfectly safe—in fact, Sabin argued it would cause more cases of polio than it would prevent—there was no shortage of volunteers. Salk did not patent his vaccine. On April 12, 1955, the day the Salk vaccine was declared “safe, effective and potent,” legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow interviewed its creator and asked who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine’s research and field testing. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Lawyers for the foundation had investigated the possibility of patenting the vaccine but did not pursue it, in part because of Salk’s reluctance. Although a tainted batch of the Salk vaccine killed 11 people, Americans continued vaccinating their children.

Dr. Albert Sabin and a poster promoting Sabin's oral polio vaccine. Just weeks after the Salk vaccine had been declared safe, more than 200 polio cases were traced to lots contaminated with virulent live polio strains manufactured by the Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California. Most taken ill became severely paralyzed. Eleven died. In the haste to rush the vaccine to the public, the federal government had not provided proper supervision of the major drug companies contracted by the March of Dimes to produce 9 million doses of vaccine for 1955. Although the United States surgeon general ordered all inoculations temporarily halted, Americans continued to vaccinate themselves and their children. Outside of the “Cutter Incident,” not a single case of polio attributed to the Salk vaccine was ever contracted in the United States. A rival vaccine supplanted Salk’s in the 1960s. Once Sabin’s oral vaccine finally became available in 1962, it quickly supplanted Salk’s injected vaccine because it was cheaper to produce and easier to administer. Ultimately, both vaccines produced by the bitter rivals nearly eradicated the disease from the planet.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were only 416 reported cases of polio worldwide in 2013, mostly confined to a handful of Asian and African countries. Since Sabin’s live-virus vaccine, which is responsible for about a dozen cases of polio each year, is seen as the final obstacle to eliminating the disease in most of the world, the WHO has urged polio-free countries to return to Salk’s killed-virus vaccine. Tags Dr. Jonas Salk: Inventor of the Polio Vaccine Home | Great Inventors | Dr. Jonas Salk Dr. Jonas Salk Inventor of the Polio Vaccine While there is still no actual cure for Polio, thanks to inventor Dr. Jonas Salk there is a way to prevent it. Before Salk invented the vaccine for Polio, America was forced to live in fear of the infectious viral disease that put Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair. Polio attacks the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, which can cause paralysis or even death. After being appointed head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947, Dr. Jonas Salk devoted himself to finding a way to curb the devastating virus.

Less than five years later, he invented a vaccine and decided to test it out. After working successfully on a sample group that included Salk, his wife and their three sons, a nationwide testing of the vaccine was launched in April 1954. The impact was dramatic: in 1955 there were 28,985 cases of polio in the U.S. and by 1957 that number had decreased to 5,894. Since he wanted it to be distributed freely to everyone, Dr. Jonas Salk never patented his polio vaccine. Though an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin gained popularity in the early 1960s, Salk's vaccine is now returning to favor because of its lowered risk factor. Today, in the U.S., cases of polio are extremely rare and The World Health Organization hopes the disease will be eradicated worldwide in the near future. Of course, that didn't stop inventor Dr. Jonas Salk from keeping busy – his last years were spent searching for a vaccine to combat AIDS. For more information on Dr. Jonas Salk and the invention of the Polio vaccine, please visit: Dr.

Jonas Salk, Whose Vaccine Turned Tide on Polio, Dies at 80 Dr. Jonas Salk, Whose Vaccine Turned Tide on Polio, Dies at 80 By HAROLD M. SCHMECK Jr. Dr. Jonas Salk, who in the 1950's developed the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, the viral illness that had gripped a fearful nation with images of children doomed to death or paralysis, died yesterday at Green Hospital in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 80. The cause was heart failure, said a spokeswoman for the Salk Institute, which Dr. Salk had established to carry out medical research. As an intense 40-year-old scientist, Dr. Salk became a revered medical figure upon the announcement in 1955 that his new polio vaccine was safe and effective. It was a turning point in the fight against a disease that condemned some victims to live the rest of their lives in tanklike breathing machines called iron lungs and placed sunny swimming holes off limits to children because of parents' fears of contagion.

The Salk vaccine changed medical history, preventing many thousands of cases of crippling illness and saving thousands of lives. In the United States, the vaccine soon ended the yearly threat of epidemics and the toll of paralysis and death. In the five years before 1955, when mass inoculations with the vaccine began, cases of paralytic polio averaged about 25,000 a year in the United States. A few years after polio vaccination became routine, the annual number of cases dropped to a dozen or so, sometimes fewer. In 1969 not a single death from polio was reported in the nation, the first such year on record, and now the disease is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. Success against polio was a critical event in the dawning of the modern era of vaccine development, which has been marked by effective preventatives against a broad range of other infectious diseases, including influenza, measles, mumps and rubella. Paralytic polio was known as early as the time of ancient Egypt. In America it was never as widespread a disease as influenza or measles.

In the 1920's, 30's and 40's, however, outbreaks of the disease came, increasingly, in frightening epidemics. Many children and young adults died, were crippled or paralyzed. Some expected the decade of the 1950's to be even worse, and in the epidemic of 1952, the worst on record, nearly 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States; more than 3,000 died of the disease. The turning point in the battle against polio was probably the day, April 12, 1955, when Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. of the University of Michigan announced at a news conference in Ann Arbor the successful results of a field trial in which 440,000 American children had been injected with Dr. Salk's new vaccine. The $7.5 million project was the climactic effort of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later changed its focus to birth defects and became the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. In the light of earlier, smaller test projects, the polio vaccine had seemed likely to be safe and highly effective.

The big field trial, which involved more than one million people including its control population, proved that it was worthy of the nation's hopes. The news caused a public sensation probably unequaled by any health development in modern times. The chairman of the board of directors of the American Medical Association, Dr. Dwight H. Murray, called it "one of the greatest events in the history of medicine." Later that spring, President Eisenhower praised Dr. Salk as a "benefactor of mankind." But the successful development of a polio vaccine also led to a long scientific debate over the relative merits of Dr. Salk's version, which used killed virus, and one developed later by Dr. Albert Sabin that used live virus. The Sabin vaccine, which is taken orally, eventually entirely supplanted the Salk vaccine in the United States, and a sharp rivalry persisted between the two scientists throughout their lives. The pinnacle of public notice and acclaim that Dr. Salk reached on the occasion of the successful field trials came to him through long years of hard work and a dedication to a principle that was less familiar then than it is now.

"My ambition," he said during an interview in 1980, "was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. "I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research," he said. Jonas Edward Salk was born in New York City Oct. 28, 1914, the eldest of three sons of Daniel B. and Doris Press Salk. Dr. Salk liked to point out that he was born into one of the decisive epochs of human history and into the beginning of a golden age of science. His father was a worker in New York's garment district. The family lived in the Bronx, where Jonas went to grade school, then to the Townsend Harris High School for exceptionally promising students. He graduated from City College in 1934 and enrolled in New York University's medical school. After his freshman year he took time out for a one-year research fellowship in chemistry. Later, while still in medical school, he served a research fellowship in a virus laboratory, where he was first introduced to a field that had never interested him, but that later shaped his entire life. He received his medical degree from N.Y.U. in 1939.

That same year he married Donna Lindsay, a social worker who had recently graduated from Smith College. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968. In 1942 Dr. Salk went to the University of Michigan on a National Research Council fellowship to study the influenza virus with Dr. Francis, an internationally known virologist. That work led him, after little more than a decade, to the conquest of polio. Dr. Salk had become interested in the influenza virus while in medical school. With Dr. Francis he helped develop commercial vaccines against flu, work considered an important contribution to the war effort. Many Americans could remember the devastating flu pandemic of 1918, in which an estimated 20 million people died throughout the world. When the University of Pittsburgh expanded its virus research program after World War II, Dr. Salk joined their staff and soon became director of virus research. There his scientific interests moved gradually from influenza virus to the urgent effort to develop a polio vaccine. There had been efforts to produce such a vaccine before the war, but some had caused paralysis instead of preventing it. Those failures had dampened the enthusiasm of many public health experts.

But polio seemed to be on the increase, and some means of coping with the disease was acutely needed. Dr. Salk's concentrated efforts against polio began when he was part of a team assigned to survey polio viruses throughout the United States to see how many varieties could be linked to the disease in humans. The research showed unequivocally that a vaccine would have to include three distinct types of polio virus, but no more. Many other viruses known to be related to polio could be ignored in fighting the disease. The three polio virus strains were known originally as the Brunhilde, Lansing and Leon strains but are now known simply as polio virus types I, II and III. A crucial factor in the ultimate success of polio vaccine was earlier research at Harvard University on methods of growing viruses in animal-cell tissue cultures in the laboratory. Dr. John Enders of Harvard later won a Nobel Prize for the work. The Salk vaccine virus was grown on monkey kidney cells, then inactivated, or killed, by formaldehyde. Dr. Salk was often described by associates as a hard-working, tough-minded scientist who was coolly confident of the points he had hammered out in painstaking scientific experiments.

During his research on polio vaccine he was conscious of being a younger scientist, sometimes a dissenter from the wisdom of his more experienced elders. Some eminent virologists insisted, right up to the first field trial, that the killed virus vaccine should be withheld in favor of a live virus vaccine concurrently under development. The live virus vaccine, developed by Dr. Sabin, was first licensed in 1961. The live virus is modified in the laboratory so that it stimulates immunity but causes no damage. Shortly after the Salk vaccine came into use, a manufacturing error left live virus in one batch. Several cases of polio resulted and use of the vaccine was halted until the explanation was found and corrective measures taken. After the polio vaccine was proved successful in the field trials, Dr. Salk became a hero to the public. An opinion poll ranked him roughly between Churchill and Gandhi as a revered figure of modern history. But among scientists, both Dr. Salk and his vaccine were somewhat controversial. The usefulness of the vaccine has been vindicated in many countries and among millions of users, but the debate over the relative merits of the Salk vaccine and the Sabin vaccine has continued.

The live virus vaccine promised lifetime immunity, while the original Salk vaccine did not. But Dr. Salk never lost faith in killed virus polio vaccine and continued to champion its cause all his life. On several occasions he pointed out that the live virus vaccine did, on rare occasions, produce the disease as well as immunity, while the killed virus vaccine, properly made, carried no such risk. For his part, Dr. Sabin, who died in 1993 at age 86, was still exasperated at the mention of Dr. Salk's name late in life. "It was pure kitchen chemistry," Dr. Sabin said a few years ago of his rival's work. "Salk didn't discover anything." After the success of 1955, Dr. Salk continued his research at the University of Pittsburgh, but there were many other demands on his time, including his membership on an expert advisory panel of the World Health Organization on virus diseases. In 1963 he fulfilled a dream he had harbored for almost a decade, the creation of a special institute where scientists and brilliant people in other fields could think, do research and work toward goals important to humanity.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the embodiment of that dream, opened that year with the financial support of the March of Dimes. It is housed in a stark but architecturally grand group of concrete buildings, designed by Louis Kahn, on a piece of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean that was donated by the city of San Diego. The group of fellows invited to work there included several winners of the Nobel Prize, an award that eluded Dr. Salk, although many other honors were conferred upon him in his lifetime. These included the Albert Lasker Award, the Robert Koch Medal, the Mellon Institute Award, a United States Presidential Citation and a Congressional Gold Medal. He was named a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur by the French Government and was awarded honorary degrees from universities in the United States, Britain, Israel, Italy and the Philippines. He was never, however, elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. At the institute that bore his name, Dr. Salk continued biomedical research on a wide range of subjects, including the immunological aspects of multiple sclerosis and cancer.

Over the last decade, he turned his attention to AIDS, trying to develop an immunization that would help prevent those already infected with H.I.V., the AIDS virus, from developing full-fledged AIDS. Scientists have been testing such an experimental immunization on hundreds of people. The president of the Salk Institute, the Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick, said today that Dr. Salk "had been the personal hero of millions of men and women." "Few have made one discovery that has benefited humanity so greatly," Dr. Crick said. "Jonas was a man who, right to his last day, was actively in pursuit of another." In later years, Dr. Salk broadened his horizons to include painting, poetry and writing on themes as much philosophical as scientific. In 1990, he said in an interview that he believed the universe had been kaleidoscopically unfolding according to certain deeply ingrained principles. "There is a dynamism, a dynamic force that propels us into the future," he said. And a few highly evolved people like himself, he added, are blessed with the ability to tap into the current. They can sense which way evolution is going and hurry it along.

"I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing all the time but as something I can guide by the choices I make, by the experiments I design," he said. "I have always sensed this as the next evolutionary step. It's not something of which a great many are capable, but some are." Dr. Salk came to believe that it was the force of evolution that guided him in the early 1950's to reject the common wisdom and develop a polio vaccine using killed viruses instead of live ones. He had a lively sense of history and a conviction that he lived at the crucial time at which the graph of world population growth changed its slope, a harbinger of future leveling-off and decline. In 1970 he married the French painter and former mistress of Picasso, Francoise Gilot, an event that created a tabloid sensation. Her influence strengthened his interest in and knowledge of the world of art. Dr. Salk's scientific publications numbered more than 100. His books included "Man Unfolding" in 1972 and "The Survival of the Wisest" in 1973.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, Peter, of San Diego, Jonathon, of Los Angeles and Darrell, of Seattle. Also in Slate: Jonas Salk didn’t patent the polio vaccine, but Google Doodles—like today’s on Salk—are patented . On April 12, 1955, Edward R. Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent to the polio vaccine. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk responded. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun ?” By the time of his chat with Murrow, which aired on the day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90 percent effective, Salk was already more messiah than virologist to the average American. Polio paralyzed between 13,000 and 20,000 children annually in the last pre-vaccine years, and Salk was the face of the inoculation initiative. Appearing on television to present the vaccine as a gift to the American people was a public relations masterstroke.

Advertisement Over the last half-century, Salk’s rhetorical question to Murrow has become a rallying cry for those who campaign against pharmaceutical company profiteering. To many, it represents a generous view of scientific discovery distilled down to a beautiful simplicity. One critic of the big pharma called Salk “the foster parent of children around the world with no thought of the money he could make by withholding the vaccine from the children of the poor.” Get Slate in your inbox. In fact, Salk’s three-sentence response to Murrow is a dangerous intuition pump —a misdirection from complex questions. It represents an easy but wrongheaded way to avoid the messy work of constructing a system to incentivize medical breakthroughs and make them widely available in the context of 21st-century economic realities. That’s not to say Salk was a propagandist or a panderer—he probably meant every word he said. But his thoughts on the polio vaccine applied to a specific situation at a specific time in our history. It helps to break Salk’s famous quote into two distinct claims: First, he argued that the polio vaccine belonged to the people. Second, he posed the rhetorical question comparing a vaccine to the sun.

The first claim is nearly indisputable as it applies to the polio vaccine itself, because the public voluntarily funded the vaccine’s incredibly expensive research and field testing. Advertisement “People worked on the polio vaccine like it was the Normandy invasion,” says Jane Smith, author of the book Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine . More than 650,000 children were vaccinated. Their doctors had to submit forms, and public health officials tracked the information. Then it all had to happen again for placebo and control groups. In the single year that the polio vaccine was unveiled, 80 million people donated money to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which spearheaded the vaccine effort. Many donors could only afford a few cents, but gave anyway (hence the foundation’s modern name, the March of Dimes). Schools, communities, and companies joined in a remarkable display of unity against the disease. Even Walt Disney’s cartoon characters contributed their talents, appearing in a film that adapted the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ song “Heigh Ho” to an anti-polio ditty.

In the 13 years leading up to the vaccine’s roll out, the budget of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis swelled from $3 million to $50 million. An entire generation of microbiologists received money from the foundation, which even played a role in Watson and Crick’s description of DNA . There was near unanimity within the organization that the public had already paid for the polio vaccine through their donations, and patenting it for profit would have represented double charging. That’s what Jonas Salk should have said to Murrow—not that all vaccines belong to the people, but rather that this vaccine belonged to the people. There is an important footnote regarding Salk’s statement that “there is no patent.” Prior to Murrow’s interview with Salk, lawyers for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of patenting the vaccine, according to documents that Jane Smith uncovered during her dive into the organization’s archives. The attorneys concluded that the vaccine didn’t meet the novelty requirements for a patent, and the application would fail. This legal analysis is sometimes used to suggest that Salk was being somewhat dishonest —there was no patent only because he and the foundation couldn’t get one. That’s unfair.

Before deciding to forgo a patent application, the organization had already committed to give the formulation and production processes for the vaccine to several pharmaceutical companies for free. No one knows why the lawyers considered a patent application, but it seems likely that they would only have used it to prevent companies from making unlicensed, low-quality versions of the vaccine. There is no indication that the foundation intended to profit from a patent on the polio vaccine. Advertisement The decision not to patent the vaccine made perfect economic sense under the circumstances. “The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was a nonprofit, centralized research and development operation,” says Robert Cook-Deegan, who studies intellectual property and genomics at Duke University. “They didn’t need an incentive structure.” Newspaper headlines celebrate the success of the polio vaccine. Photo courtesy March of Dimes/Wikimedia Commons That brings us to Salk’s grand question: Can you patent the sun? When you unpack this query, which is really a policy argument, you find two assumptions. Most obviously, Salk assumed that a vaccine is a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a human invention. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, he implies that this distinction should be central in patent law. Both of these points are debatable.

Whether a vaccine should be viewed as a naturally occurring substance, rather than a product of human engineering, may depend on the details of the individual inoculation. In 1796, Edward Jenner immunized an 8-year-old boy against smallpox by injecting him with pus from a milk maid who had been exposed to cowpox, a related disease. (The word vaccine comes from vaccinia, the Latin name for cowpox.) While ingenious, moving pus from one person to another would not entitle Jenner to a patent in modern America. Few modern vaccines are that simple, though. Some still contain live or dead cells from the pathogen itself, but others contain genetically modified versions of the virus or bacteria. Some rely on one or more proteins from the pathogen, or a part of a protein that’s sufficient to trigger an immune response. The flu vaccine, which has to be made anew every year, involves months of work by highly trained scientists working in state-of-the-art laboratories. It’s a stretch to describe modern vaccines as naturally occurring, even if parts of them are. Although the U.S. government has issued thousands of patents related to vaccines, American jurisprudence is still in a state of confusion on this issue.

The Patent Act of 1952, which established the current structure of patent law, did not recognize a difference between inventions and discoveries. When that distinction came from the Supreme Court in 1980, the court made clear that “ products of nature ”—like the sun, as Salk might say—are not patentable. Isolating and purifying a product, however, may render it patentable under the right conditions. Advertisement Should the Supreme Court ever get around to clarifying the patentability of vaccines, it may consider revisiting the distinction between discovery and invention, because it misses the point of intellectual property law: to incentivize research that will benefit humanity. Even if a vaccine is a product of nature, discovering that product and making it useful is absolutely nothing like discovering the sun and putting it to work. (Most living creatures have managed that trick on a daily basis for billions of years.) Since Jenner, few microbiologists have stumbled upon effective vaccines. Without the promise of exclusive marketing rights for some period, no profit-minded private entity would undertake the necessary research. The landscape has shifted since Salk’s heyday. The U.S.

government is now the primary applicant for vaccine-related patents, followed by GlaxoSmithKline and a number of other corporations. Private groups, like the Pasteur Institute, are also active. Responsibility for vaccine development is more evenly distributed now than in the 1950s, and that’s a good thing. Top Comment A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Salk produces polio vaccine Salk produces polio vaccine 1952 Poliomyelitis has been around since ancient times. There is still no cure for the disease. But at the peak of its devastation in the United States, Jonas Salk introduced a way to prevent it. This infectious viral disease attacks the nerve cells and sometimes the central nervous system, often causing muscle wasting and paralysis and even death. Since 1900 there had been cycles of epidemics, each seeming to get stronger and more disastrous. The disease, whose early symptoms are like the flu, struck mostly children, although adults, including Franklin Roosevelt, caught it too. As a medical student and later a researcher at the University of Michigan, Salk studied viruses, such as influenza, and ways to vaccinate against them. Successful vaccines already existed for diseases such as smallpox.

For each virus, a vaccine must be custom-made, but the principles are the same: if your body is exposed to a very weak or small amount of the disease virus, it will produce antibodies, chemicals to resist and kill the virus. Then when a full-strength version of the disease virus comes along, your body is prepared to fight it. In 1947 Salk became head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He began investigating the poliovirus. To start with, he had to sort the 125 strains of the virus. He found that they fell into three basic types and knew that a vaccine would have to include these three types to protect against all polio. One of the hardest things about working with poliovirus was manufacturing enough to experiment with�and to make vaccine production practical. In 1948 researchers at Harvard (J.F. Enders, T.H. Weller, and F.C. Robbins) made a breakthrough with this. They found that the virus could grow on scraps of tissue, without needing an intact organism like a chick embryo.

Bacteria usually contaminated the tissue, but Enders' team was now able to get penicillin -- discovered 20 years earlier by Alexander Fleming and developed in the 1940s by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey -- and prevent the bacterial growth. Now viruses like mumps or polio could be created in large quantities for study. This team won the 1954 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine. Now Salk could speed up his research. Using formaldehyde, he killed the polio virus but kept it intact enough to trigger the body's response. On July 2, 1952, Salk tried a refined vaccine on children who'd already had polio and recovered. After the vaccination, their antibodies increased. He then tried it on volunteers who had not had polio, including himself, his wife, and their children. The volunteers all produced antibodies, and none got sick. In 1953 Salk reported his findings in The Journal of the American Medical Association. A nationwide testing of the vaccine was launched in April 1954 with the mass inoculation of school children. The results were amazing -- 60-70 percent prevention -- and Salk was praised to the skies.

But suddenly, some 200 cases of the disease were caused by the vaccine and 11 people died. All testing was halted. It seemed that people's hopes were dashed until investigators found that the disease-causing vaccine all came from one poorly made batch at one drug company. Higher production standards were adopted and vaccinations resumed, with over 4 million given by August 1955. The impact was dramatic: In 1955 there were 28,985 cases of polio; in 1956, 14,647; in 1957, 5,894. By 1959, 90 other countries used Salk's vaccine. Another researcher, Albert Sabin, didn't think Salk's killed-virus vaccine was strong enough. He wanted to mimic the real-life infection as much as possible; that meant using a weakened form of the live virus. He experimented with more than 9,000 monkeys and 100 chimpanzees before isolating a rare form of poliovirus that would reproduce in the intestinal tract but not in the central nervous system.

In 1957 he was ready for human trials of an vaccine people could swallow, not get in a shot. It was tested in other countries, including the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1958 other researchers tested a strain in the U.S. and they tried to cast doubts on Sabin's "communist vaccine." In spite of this, his vaccine was licensed in 1962 and quickly became the vaccine of choice. It was cheaper to make and easier to take than Salk's injectable vaccine. In the U.S., cases of polio are now extremely rare, and ironically, are almost always caused by the Sabin vaccine itself -- being live, the virus can mutate to a stronger form. Elsewhere there are still about 250,000 cases per year, mostly in developing nations where vaccination has not become widespread. The World Health Organization has goals to eradicate polio completely in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Related Features When Did Jonas Salk Invent the Polio Vaccine | Vision Launch When Did Jonas Salk Invent the Polio Vaccine Tweet on Twitter Although vaccines had been around for a number of years when Jonas Salk was doing his work, many of the diseases that we get vaccinations for today were considered untreatable at best and many of them were fatal. Amongst the worst diseases of the time was polio, which could cripple a child like nothing else ever could. Sending kids into iron lungs or wheelchairs if it didn’t kill them outright, polio was a scourge that needed to be stopped. That’s where Dr. Jonas Salk stepped in. He believed that a virus could be deactivated if the human body could develop antibodies against it. He used formaldehyde to kill the virus, but leave it intact enough so that an immune response could be developed. After testing on animals and his team, the research went out in 1954 on a national level to determine if it was safe and effective. Before the vaccine, there were more than 45,000 polio cases in the United States.

In just 7 years after the vaccine was declared safe in 1955, there were just 910 reported cases of the disease. Salk never attempted to patent the vaccine. Salk Was Also Involved in AIDS Research Another nasty virus was beginning to make its way through the human population near the end of Salk’s life: AIDS. He joined the fight with his institute, attempting to develop a vaccine therapy based on the information that was known at the time. The project was discontinued in 2007, 12 years after Salk passed away, without an ability to cure the disease. His research, however, developed many of the advances that have helped to treat people with this disease. After Salk’s death, the March of Dimes created an annual cash prize of a quarter million dollars to those who contribute work to the field of biology in his name. World Polio Day has been established to honor his accomplishments as well and a number of vaccine research techniques have been developed since based on Salk’s models. Not bad for a guy who joined in a desperate attempt to solve the deadly riddle of polio.

The Vaccine Wasn’t Without Tragedy One of the laboratories that were authorized to produce the vaccine, Cutter Laboratories, ended up creating a lot of vaccines that had live virus in with the injection. It caused several thousand children to get sick from the exposure, caused 56 incidents of paralysis, and 5 deaths from the production error. Dr. Albert Sabin was also a researcher concerned with the development of a polio vaccine and he developed a live virus option. It was administered orally and Sabin claimed it was more effective than Salk’s vaccine. This created some confusion in the general population since both were available until 1998. At that point, the Sabin vaccine was declared ineffective and Salk’s vaccine, 40 years later, was still the exclusive method for polio elimination. Thanks to Jonas Salk, the world has the ability to protect itself against a very dangerous virus. Polio does not bring the fear that it once did. For that, parents everywhere, every day are eternally grateful.

Facebook Jonas Salk and Albert Bruce Sabin | Chemical Heritage Foundation Search Jonas Salk and Albert Bruce Sabin In the 1950s Salk and Sabin developed separate vaccines—one from killed virus and the other from live virus—to combat the dreaded disease polio. Home / Learn / Historical Biographies Jonas Salk became a national hero when he allayed the fear of polio with his vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Sabin introduced an oral vaccine in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s. Polio Season In the first half of the 20th century, summer was a dreaded time for children. Although they could enjoy the long days of unfettered play, summer was also known as “polio season.” Children were among the most susceptible to paralytic poliomyelitis (also known as infantile paralysis), a disease that affects the central nervous system and can result in paralysis. When exposed to a poliovirus in the first months of life, infants usually manifested only mild symptoms because they were protected from paralysis by maternal antibodies still present in their bodies.

However, as hygienic conditions improved and fewer newborns were exposed to the virus (which is present in human sewage), paralytic poliomyelitis began to appear in older children and adults who did not have an infant’s benefit of immunity. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is perhaps the most famous victim of the poliovirus. In 1921, at the age of 39, he contracted the disease, one of the thousands that were afflicted that year. The Vaccines In the early 1950s, 25,000 to 50,000 new cases of polio occurred each year. Jonas Salk (1914–1995) became a national hero when he allayed the fear of the dreaded disease with his polio vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Bruce Sabin (1906–1993) introduced an oral vaccine in the United States in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s.

Although the disease was finally brought under control because of these vaccines, the science behind them fired debate that continues to this day. Courtesy Jonas Salk Polio Vaccine Collection, 1953–2005, UA.90.F89, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. Salk’s Education and Work on Influenza Jonas Salk was born in New York City, his parents’ eldest son. His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant and his father the son of Jewish immigrants. Salk was encouraged throughout his youth to succeed academically. He graduated from high school at the age of 15 and then entered the City College of New York. Although he originally intended to pursue law, he became interested in medicine and altered his career path, graduating with a degree in science in 1933. At 19 Salk enrolled in the New York University School of Medicine. His intention was not to practice medicine, however; he wanted to be a medical researcher. Toward the end of his medical education he began to work with Thomas Francis Jr., who was to be his mentor for many years. Salk received his MD in 1939 and, after completing his internship at Mt.

Sinai Hospital, accepted a National Research Council fellowship to work at the University of Michigan. There he rejoined Francis (who had since moved to Michigan) and spent six years researching the influenzavirus and developing a flu vaccine, work largely supported by the U.S. Army. The vaccine that they ultimately developed in 1943 was a killed-virus vaccine: it contained a formalin-killed strain of the influenzavirus that could not cause the disease but did induce antibodies able to ward off future viral attacks. Francis and Salk were among the pioneers of killed-virus vaccines. Up to that time attenuated (weakened) live viruses were used to produce vaccines. The Virus Research Laboratory and Poliovirus In 1947 Salk accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to establish a Virus Research Laboratory. He devoted his efforts to creating a first-class research environment and to publishing scientific papers on a variety of topics, including poliovirus. His work drew the attention of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes), and he was invited to participate in a research program sponsored by the foundation. He agreed and took up his assignment of typing polioviruses.

The “Killed-Virus” Principle In 1951 the National Foundation typing program confirmed that there were three types of poliovirus. By that time Salk was convinced that the same “killed-virus” principle he had used to develop an influenza vaccine would work for polio. He also believed that it would be less dangerous than a live vaccine: if the vaccine contained only dead virus, then it could not accidentally cause polio in those inoculated. One difficulty, however, was that large quantities of poliovirus were needed to produce a killed-virus vaccine because a killed virus will not grow in the body after administration the way a live virus will. In 1949 John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins had discovered that poliovirus could be grown in laboratory tissue cultures of non-nerve tissue (earning them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954). The work of Enders and his colleagues paved the way for Salk, for it provided a method of growing the virus without injecting live monkeys. Salk developed methods for growing large quantities of the three types of polioviruses on cultures of monkey kidney cells. He then killed the viruses with formaldehyde.

When injected into monkeys, the vaccine protected them against paralytic poliomyelitis. In 1952 Salk began testing the vaccine in humans, starting with children who had already been infected with the virus. He measured their antibody levels before vaccination and then was excited to see that the levels had been raised significantly by the vaccine. Jonas Salk and a nurse administering the vaccine. Courtesy Jonas Salk Polio Vaccine Collection, 1953–2005, UA.90.F89, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. Field Trials In 1954 a massive controlled field trial was launched, sponsored by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Almost two million U.S. children between the ages of six and nine participated. In some areas of the country half of these “Polio Pioneers” received the vaccine, while half received a placebo. In other areas of the country children who did not receive any vaccine were carefully observed. On April 12, 1955, Thomas Francis, Salk’s mentor and the director of the trial, reported that the vaccine was safe, potent, and 90% effective in protecting against paralytic poliomyelitis.

In order to conduct these massive trials Salk’s vaccine needed to be produced on a large scale. Accomplishing this required the assistance of the pharmaceutical industry, and well-known companies like Eli Lilly and Company, Wyeth Laboratories, and Parke, Davis and Company agreed to make the new vaccine. Sabin’s Path to Polio Research In the meantime a live-virus vaccine for polio was being developed by Albert Sabin. Sabin, like many scientists of the time, believed that only a living virus would be able to guarantee immunity for an extended period. Sabin was born in 1906 in Bialystok, Russia (now part of Poland). At the age of 15 he emigrated with his family to the United States. After Sabin graduated from high school in Paterson, New Jersey, his uncle agreed to finance his college education, provided that Sabin studied dentistry. After two years preparing for dentistry at New York University, Sabin switched to medicine, having developed an interest in virology. In doing so he lost his financial support, but odd jobs and scholarships enabled him to continue his education.

Sabin received his BS in 1928 and afterward enrolled in the New York University College of Medicine. While at medical school Sabin spent time researching pneumonia, developing an accurate and efficient method of determining its cause in individual cases—either pneumococcus or virus. He received his MD in 1931 and, after completing his internship, traveled to the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine in London to conduct research. A year later he returned to the United States, having accepted a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There Sabin developed an interest in poliovirus. In 1936 he and a colleague were able to grow poliovirus in brain tissue from a human embryo. During World War II, Sabin left his polio research to serve in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. There he investigated other diseases like insect-borne encephalitis and dengue, working on vaccines for both. Sabin’s Live-Virus Vaccine After the war Sabin accepted a position at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine as a professor of research pediatrics. He then was able to return to his polio studies.

To learn as much as possible about the disease, he and his colleagues performed autopsies on everyone within 400 miles of Cincinnati who had died of polio. These autopsies indicated that poliovirus affected both the intestinal tract and the central nervous system. From this finding Sabin was able to prove that polio first attacked the intestinal tract before moving on to nerve tissue. This discovery suggested that the virus could be grown in non-nerve tissue, a feat later accomplished in tissue culture by the Nobel laureates Enders, Weller, and Robbins. Growing poliovirus in non-nerve tissue culture was more practical than Sabin’s previous achievement of growing it in brain tissue from embryos. Around the same time that Salk began his work on a killed-virus vaccine, Sabin began work on an attenuated live-virus vaccine. Sabin felt that an oral vaccine would be superior to an injection, as it would be easier to administer. He began to grow and test many virus strains in animals and tissue cultures and eventually found three mutant strains of the virus that appeared to stimulate antibody production without causing paralysis.

Sabin then tested these strains on humans: his subjects included himself and his family, research associates, and prisoners from the nearby Chillicothe Penitentiary. sabin.jpg Albert Sabin demonstrates how the oral vaccine for polio is given to children. Courtesy Hauck Center for the Albert B. Sabin Archives, Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions, University of Cincinnati. Testing the Live-Virus Vaccine Because Salk’s vaccine was being used successfully in the United States, Sabin was not able to get support for a large-scale, controlled field trial like the trial of Salk’s vaccine. In 1957 Sabin convinced the Soviet Union’s Health Ministry to conduct field studies with his vaccine. After the Soviet trial succeeded in 1960, the U.S. Public Health Service approved the vaccine in 1961 for manufacture in the United States, and the World Health Organization (WHO) began to use live-virus vaccine produced in the USSR. Success and Polio Eradication In the late 1950s Sabin entered into an agreement with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to produce his live-virus vaccine.

He presented Pfizer with the master strains of the virus, and the company began to perfect its production technique in its British facilities. Sabin’s live-virus, oral polio vaccine (administered in drops or on a sugar cube) soon replaced Salk’s killed-virus, injectable vaccine in many parts of the world. In 1994 the WHO declared that naturally occurring poliovirus had been eradicated from the Western Hemisphere owing to repeated mass immunization campaigns with the Sabin vaccine in Central and South America. The only occurrences of paralytic poliomyelitis in the West after this time were the few cases caused by the live-virus vaccine itself. Live-Virus versus Killed-Virus Controversy During his lifetime Sabin staunchly defended his live-virus vaccine, refusing to believe any evidence that it could cause paralytic poliomyelitis. Salk, for his part, believed that killed-virus vaccine produced equivalent protection in individuals and in communities without any risk for causing paralysis. Despite Sabin’s belief, the risk for paralysis from the live-virus vaccine does exist, although it is slight.

In 1999 a federal advisory panel recommended that the United States return to Salk’s vaccine because it cannot accidentally cause polio. On the basis of a decade of additional evidence, this recommendation was reconfirmed in 2009. Later Research Although he was the first to produce a polio vaccine, Salk did not win the Nobel Prize or become a member of the National Academy of Sciences. An object of public adulation because of his pioneering work, he spent his life trying to avoid the limelight but nevertheless endured the animosity of many of his colleagues who saw him as a “publicity hound.” In 1962 he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, an enterprise initially funded with support from the March of Dimes. Salk’s own research continued, most significantly on multiple sclerosis, cancer, and AIDS. Salk spent the later years of his life committed to developing a killed-virus vaccine to prevent the development of AIDS in those infected with human immunodeficiency virus. Sabin, too, continued his work and held a series of influential positions at such organizations as the Weizmann Institute of Science, the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.

The information contained in this biography was last updated on July 21, 2015. About Jonas Salk - Salk Institute for Biological Studies About Jonas Salk Home - About - History of Salk - About Jonas Salk Jonas Salk Jonas Edward Salk was born October 28, 1914 in New York City, the eldest of three sons to Russian-Jewish immigrants Daniel and Dora Salk. The first member of his family to attend college, he earned his medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine in 1939 and became a scientist physician at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1942, Salk went to the University of Michigan on a research fellowship to develop an influenza vaccine. He soon advanced to the position of assistant professor of epidemiology. He also reconnected with his NYU friend and mentor, Thomas Francis, Jr., head of the epidemiology department at Michigan’s new School of Public Health, who taught him the methodology of vaccine development. In 1947, Salk was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

With funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—now known as the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation—he began to develop the techniques that would lead to a vaccine to wipe out the most frightening scourge of the time: paralytic poliomyelitis. Contrary to the era’s prevailing scientific opinion, Salk believed his vaccine, composed of “killed” polio virus, could immunize without risk of infecting the patient. Salk administered the vaccine to volunteers who had not had polio, including himself, his lab scientist, his wife and their children. All developed anti-polio antibodies and experienced no negative reactions to the vaccine. In 1954, national testing began on one million children, ages six to nine, who became known as the Polio Pioneers. On April 12, 1955, the results were announced: the vaccine was safe and effective. In the two years before the vaccine was widely available, the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than 45,000. By 1962, that number had dropped to 910.

Hailed as a miracle worker, Salk never patented the vaccine or earned any money from his discovery, preferring it be distributed as widely as possible. Founding the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla in 1963 was Salk’s second triumph. He was aided with a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation and support from the March of Dimes. Salk spent his last years searching for a vaccine against AIDS. He died on June 23, 1995 at the age of 80 in La Jolla, California. His life’s philosophy is memorialized at the Institute with his now famous quote: “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality." Support Salk Research Jonas Salk Google doodle: a good reminder of the power of vaccines | Science | The Guardian Head quarters Jonas Salk Google doodle: a good reminder of the power of vaccines The story of the vaccine’s development is just one part of a rich and intertwined history of scientific discovery and controversy Google doodle marks the 100th birth anniversary of Jonas Salk, who pioneered the first polio vaccine.

Photograph: Google.com Tuesday 28 October 2014 13.39 EDT First published on Tuesday 28 October 2014 09.44 EDT Close This article is 2 years old In 1954, over 300,000 doctors, nurses, schoolteachers and other volunteers across the United States, Canada and Finland took part in one of the most complex and monumental medical trials in history. The plan was to test the effectiveness of a newly-developed vaccine for a disease that was devastating the lives of children across the US: polio . It was a mammoth task – a double-blind experiment, in which 650,000 schoolchildren were given the vaccine, 750,000 were given a placebo, and over 400,000 children acted as a control group and were given neither. For taking part, each participant was given a sweet and a certificate proclaiming their role as a ‘Polio Pioneer’ . The results, announced in 1955, were just as monumental: the vaccine was safe and effective.

As a direct result of the development of the vaccine, polio was completely eradicated in the US by 1979. The vaccine itself was the result of years of tireless work by a researcher based at the University of Pittsburgh called Jonas Salk, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated in a Google doodle today. The doodle shows two children holding up a sign that says “Thank you, Dr Salk!” – echoing the gratitude expressed by many Americans when the results were announced. But the story of Salk’s search for a vaccine isn’t one that should be told in isolation, stopping with the elimination of polio in the US. Instead, it sits within a rich tapestry of stories about scientific discovery and progress. In order to develop a new vaccine, Salk needed cell cultures that he could first infect with polio, and then test the treatment. The cells that he used are known as HeLa cells , which in themselves carry a fascinating history. HeLa cells are an immortalised cell line , that can be grown in the lab for prolonged periods of time. The name comes from an abbreviation of Henrietta Lacks , the person from whom the cell line originated.

In 1951, Lacks was undergoing radiation treatment for cervical cancer. During one of these sessions, doctors performed a biopsy – without her permission – to remove samples of healthy and cancerous cells from her cervix. These cells would eventually end up becoming the first line of human cells that could be successfully and persistently reproduced in a lab , and have since been used in countless studies ranging from cancer research, to seeing what happens to human flesh in space . But in recent years, the story of HeLa cells has also become one of patient privacy and respect, when the HeLa genome was published in 2013 without the knowledge or consent of her family. Aside from cell cultures, Salk needed something else to develop his vaccine: money. In 1938, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes Foundation ) was set up in order to raise awareness and funds for the polio epidemic in the US. As public concern about the disease grew, so too did the foundations budget – from $1.8m in 1938 to $67m in 1955 .

Salk found an ally in the then-head of the NFIP, Basil O’Connor, who gladly funded the new vaccine research. But it wasn’t just polio that benefitted from the March of Dimes. In 1952, a young American molecular biologist called James Watson received a grant from the foundation to travel to the University of Cambridge. There, he met Francis Crick, and in 1953 discovered the structure of DNA. Since then, funding from the March of Dimes has gone to eight Nobel prize winners. One other aspect of Salk’s story still plays a vital role in the development and use of vaccines today: public support. In many ways, the 1954 field tests of the polio vaccine are a major success story in public health and scientific engagement – according to some sources , a Gallup poll that year showed that more Americans knew about the trials than could give the full name of then president, Dwight Eisenhower. In short, it appeared that there was unprecedented support for the vaccine. It is therefore a sad and strange irony that there now appears to be a growing backlash against vaccines in the US and UK – particularly the MMR vaccine.

Since Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent paper in 1998 purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism , incidences of measles and mumps have risen greatly. Despite this, and despite studies showing clear costs to society when vaccine rates drop, antivaccinationists still insist on ignoring the evidence when it comes to immunising children. It therefore seems like the celebration of Salk’s 100th birthday is an apt time to remember how hugely important vaccination is – not just on an individual level, but for public health as a whole. History of Salk - Salk Institute for Biological Studies History of Salk Home - About - History of Salk Salk Institute In 1957, Jonas Salk, developer of the first safe and effective polio vaccine, began his quest to fulfill his second dream: create a collaborative environment where researchers could explore the basic principles of life and contemplate the wider implications of their discoveries for the future of humanity. Gifted with 27 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean by the City of San Diego in 1960, Salk partnered with architect Louis Kahn to design such a research center.

He summarized his aesthetic objectives by telling Kahn to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso.” With financial support from the National Foundation/March of Dimes, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies opened its doors in 1963. In addition to Salk, the first Resident Fellows were Jacob Bronowski, Melvin Cohn, Renato Dulbecco, Edwin Lennox and Leslie Orgel. The Nonresident Fellows were Leo Szilard, Francis Crick, Salvador Luria, Jacques Monod and Warren Weaver. The major study areas are aging and regenerative medicine , cancer biology , immune system biology , metabolism and diabetes , neuroscience and neurological disorders and plant biology . Salk research provides new understanding and potential treatments for a range of diseases, from AIDS and Alzheimer’s to cancer and cardiovascular disorders. Discoveries by plant biologists are paving the way to improving the quality and quantity of the world’s food supply and to addressing critical environmental problems, including global warming. The Institute is supported by research grants from the National Institutes of Health, private foundations and individuals who value scientific trailblazing. The March of Dimes, which has backed the Institute since its inception, continues to contribute financially every year.

As its first director, Salk said of his eponymous institute: “The Salk Institute is a curious place, not easily understood, and the reason for it is that this is a place in the process of creation. It is being created and is engaged in studies of creation. We cannot be certain what will happen here, but we can be certain it will contribute to the welfare and understanding of man.” For more details about the history of the Salk Institute, click here for information about the “Genesis of The Salk Institute” . Written by Suzanne Bourgeois , Professor Emerita and Founding Director of the Regulatory Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. Historical Milestones Jonas Salk visits San Diego. 1960 San Diego Mayor Charles Dail, a polio survivor, lobbies Salk to build his dream institute locally. In June, in a special referendum, voters overwhelmingly approve giving Salk 27 acres on a La Jolla mesa, just west of the proposed site for the new University of California, San Diego. With funding from the National Foundation/March of Dimes, Salk selects architect Louis Kahn to collaborate on design. 1960 Salk becomes first Institute president on December 28.

He serves until March 7, 1962. 1962 Groundbreaking takes place in June. Concrete is poured in December. 1963 First labs are set up in temporary buildings. The first Resident Fellows are chosen: Salk, Jacob Bronowski, Melvin Cohn, Renato Dulbecco, Edwin Lennox and Leslie Orgel. The first Nonresident Fellows are Leo Szilard, Francis Crick, Salvador Luria, Jacques Monod, and Warren Weaver. Salk again serves as president, from September 29 to June 16, 1965. 1966 Researchers move into labs in the new north building. 1967 Institute construction is complete. 1968 Renato Dulbecco publishes discovery that viruses cause cancer by inserting their genes into the chromosomes of infected cells. He is awarded a Nobel Prize for this research in 1975. 1972 Jim Patrick and Jon Lindstrom purify an acetylcholine receptor, a molecule that triggers muscle contraction in response to a nerve signal. This leads to the discovery of the cause of the paralyzing disease myasthenia gravis.

1973 Roger Guillemin and colleagues discover somatostatin, a brain hormone that blocks the release of growth hormone. It is now used to treat peptic ulcers. 1974 Robert Holley discovers that serum contains factors that control cell division. 1977 Roger Guillemin, Floyd Bloom and colleagues characterize endorphins. 1977 Roger Guillemin receives Nobel Prize for his work on neurohormones. 1979 Tony Hunter and Bart Sefton discover tyrosine phosphorylation, a new type of protein modification. In the ensuing three decades, research leads to the development of tyrosine kinase inhibitors that provide a new approach to cancer treatment. 1981 Wylie Vale and colleagues discover, isolate and characterize corticotropin-releasing hormone that controls the body’s response to stress. 1982 Stephen Heinemann and colleagues clone first nicotinic receptor gene, providing a critical tool to pursue receptors on brain cells. 1982 Roger Guillemin and colleagues isolate growth hormone-releasing factor that triggers release of growth hormone from the pituitary gland. 1983 Inder Verma and colleagues develop genetically engineered viruses potentially useful in gene therapy.

1984 Ursula Bellugi’s work leads to discovery that the left hemisphere of the brain becomes specialized for languages, whether spoken or signed. 1985 Ronald Evans and his lab clone and characterize the first nuclear hormone receptor, the human glucocorticoid receptor, and subsequently establish the unexpected existence of a nuclear receptor superfamily. This work leads to the principles of DNA recognition, receptor heterodimer formation and the discovery of the DNA code for hormone response. 1985 Roger Guillemin and colleagues discover the structure of fibroblast growth factor, a substance that affects blood vessel growth, among other functions. 1987 Researchers in the labs of Guillemin and Vale purify and characterize the reproductive hormone inhibin, leading to the discovery of activins, related molecules that have many roles outside the reproductive system. 1987 Wylie Vale and colleagues discover link between the immune system and the brain. 1987 Chris Lamb and colleagues show that different plant defense genes activate by various forms of stress. 1988 Marc Montminy and colleagues show how chemical changes induced by hormonal signals can alter gene activity.

1989 Terry Sejnowski and colleagues demonstrate a brain change (long-term depression) thought to be critical to memory formation. 1989 Stephen Heinemann and colleagues clone first gene for a glutamate receptor, a molecule thought to be involved in memory formation. Late 1980s Jonas Salk begins work on developing a vaccine for AIDS. 1990 Pamela Mellon develops transgenic mice with a heritable cancer having features identical to human retinoblastoma. She also discovers a technique to immortalize nerve cells in the brain for study in test tubes. 1990 Jonas Salk receives first Presidential Commemorative Award of the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles chapter. 1991 Wylie Vale and colleagues isolate a gene encoding CRF-binding protein that protects the body against a flood of corticotropin-releasing hormone produced by the placenta. 1991 Salk Institute declared an historic landmark. 1995

Question: For what disease did Jonas Salk invent a vaccine?
Answer: Polio