1914-
Virologist Who Developed the First Widely Administered Polio Vaccine

Medical Hero.

Jonas Salk was propelled into worldwide acclaim for his development of the first successful long-term vaccine against polio. Although the Salk polio vaccine achieved incomplete immunity and was completely replaced within a decade, Americans in the mid 1950s viewed Salk as a hero in the battle against a disease that had crippled a president (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and shortened or restricted tens of thousands of young lives.

Director of Virus Research.

When the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine expanded its Virus Research Laboratory in 1947, the thirty-three-yearold Salk was named its director. During the course of a three-year project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, he demonstrated the existence of three types of polio virus and concluded that a vaccine must immunize against all of them to be effective.

Salk and the NFIP.