Jonas Salk
From Philosopedia
Salk, Jonas Edward (28 October 1914 - 23 June 1995)
Dr. Salk, an American physician and microbiologist who developed a vaccine against poliomyelitis, was one of America’s all-time leading scientists.
In the 1960s he developed the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, the viral illness that had gripped the nation in fear with images of children doomed to death or paralysis. His 1955 announcement that the new polio vaccine was safe and effective became a turning point in the fight against a disease which, wrote journalist Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “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.”
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 by the time of his death the disease was on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. 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. Albert Sabin, was first licensed in 1961. The live virus is modified in the laboratory so that it stimulates immunity but causes no damage. After the polio vaccine was proved successful in the field trials, Dr. Salk became a hero to the public with opinion polls ranking him, Schmeck added, roughly between Churchill and Gandhi as a revered figure of modern history.
In 1976 the American Humanist Association named Dr. Salk Humanist of the Year. In 1977 in Washington, DC, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
At the time of his death, from a heart attack, Dr. Salk had 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. From 1970 on, he also lived with and was married to Françoise Gilot, a French painter and the former mistress of Pablo Picasso.
