The Vaccine Nobody Owned

Every summer, parents in America were afraid.

When the weather grew warm, swimming pools closed. Cinemas stood half empty. Mothers kept their children away from parks and crowds. Nobody knew exactly how the disease spread, only that it came with the summer and that it struck children most of all.

The disease was poliomyelitis, or polio. Often it caused nothing worse than a fever. But in some children it attacked the nerves of the spine, leaving them unable to walk. In the worst cases, it paralysed the muscles they needed to breathe, and they had to live inside huge machines called iron lungs that breathed for them. Some died.

In 1952, the worst year, there were nearly 58,000 cases in the United States alone.

The young doctor

Jonas Salk was born in New York City on 28 October 1914. His parents were Jewish immigrants who had little schooling themselves but wanted their sons to have every chance. Jonas was the first in his family to go to college.

He trained as a doctor, but he chose not to treat patients one by one. He wanted to do research that might help many people at once. He worked first on vaccines against influenza, and in 1947 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh to run his own laboratory.

Much of his polio work was paid for by a charity, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. It had been founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had himself been paralysed by polio as an adult. Its fundraising campaign was called the March of Dimes. Millions of ordinary Americans sent in a dime, ten cents, at a time.

A killed virus

Many scientists believed that the only lasting protection would come from a vaccine made with a weakened, living virus. Salk took a different path. He grew the polio virus in the laboratory and killed it with a chemical, formaldehyde. His idea was that the body would learn to recognise the dead virus and build defences against it, without any risk of catching the disease.

He and his team worked long days and nights for years. In 1953, convinced the vaccine was safe, he gave it to himself, to his wife and to their three young sons.

The great trial

In 1954, the vaccine was tested in the largest medical trial America had ever seen. Around 1.8 million schoolchildren took part. Some were given the vaccine, some a harmless injection that looked just the same, and some were simply watched. They were called the Polio Pioneers. Thousands of volunteers, teachers and nurses helped.

The results were studied for nearly a year by an independent team led by Dr Thomas Francis Jr, who had once been Salk's teacher.

On 12 April 1955, at the University of Michigan, Dr Francis announced the results to a packed hall and to the world. The vaccine worked. It was safe, and it was effective.

Across America, church bells rang. Shops put signs in their windows. People wept with relief in the streets. Jonas Salk became a hero overnight.

Could you patent the sun?

That evening, Salk was interviewed on television by the famous journalist Edward R. Murrow. Murrow asked him who owned the patent on the vaccine.

Salk replied: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

Historians have since pointed out that lawyers for the National Foundation had looked into a patent and doubted that one could be granted. But Salk never tried to profit from the vaccine, and his words became a symbol of science done for the good of everyone.

A hard lesson, and a long victory

Just weeks after the announcement, there was a terrible setback. One company had made batches of the vaccine in which the virus had not been properly killed. Tens of thousands of children caught polio from it. Most cases were mild, but some children were paralysed, and some died. Vaccination was halted while safety rules were tightened. Then it began again, and this time it went well.

Within a few years, polio cases in the United States had fallen dramatically. Later, a second vaccine, taken as drops by mouth and developed by Albert Sabin, carried the fight around the world. In 2014, India, which had once had more polio cases than any other country, was declared free of the disease.

Jonas Salk went on to found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. He died on 23 June 1995.

Want to read more?

David M. Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story, which won the Pulitzer Prize, tells the whole history, including the trial and the setback. Jane S. Smith's Patenting the Sun takes its title from Salk's famous answer.