Many generations have never heard of Dr. Jonas Salk – the world’s most renowned virologist. Almost no one of any generation has ever known that Salk was working on a solution to AIDS in the 1980s at the same time Fauci was.
Jonas Salk was born in New York City, October 28, 1914, to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. Salk’s parents did not receive extensive formal education. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, “a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school.” In high school “he was known as a perfectionist … who read everything he could lay his hands on,” according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school’s motto “study, study, study.”
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that “for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth.”
At his mother’s urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were “barely second rate.” There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. “What made the place special,” he writes, “was the student body that had fought so hard to get there… driven by their parents…. From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley.” Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a “common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way.”
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was “comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews… while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place.” Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in.
Salk has said: “My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine., although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis.”
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: “I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so.” [Isn’t COVID a flu virus?]
In 1941, after graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York’s prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis’s laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’s polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer ‘killed’ virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. “Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you’ve lost your anonymity”, the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, “Who owns this patent?”, Salk replied, “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented.
For the most part, however, Salk was “appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy“, wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, “at 40, the once obscure scientist … was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero.” But “despite such very nice tributes”, The New York Times wrote, “Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. … He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory … because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist. He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs.” And “He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money. That belongs “in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary”, he said.
Many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, “helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena ‘from cell to society’.” Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, “I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there.”
In 1966, Salk described his “ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy. Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
“Dr. Salk has not lost sight of the institute’s immediate aim, which is the development and use of the new biology, called molecular and cellular biology. There is talk here of the possibility, once the secret of how the cell is triggered to manufacture antibodies is discovered, that a single vaccine may be developed to protect a child against many common infectious diseases. There is speculation about the power to isolate and perhaps eliminate genetic errors that lead to birth defects.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He co-founded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product.
“Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, “people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since “a risk-free society would become a dead-end society” without progress.”
“Salk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
“Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk’s true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks”
“Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.”
NOTE: How could government agencies responsible for Public Health snub, ostracize and ignore the world’s most unimpeachable virologist? How could a virologist with such a stunning resume’ of success not obtain liability insurance for an AIDS antibody? In preference to a politician posing as a scientist? One would search in vain for a greater example of the Peter Principle.
*This ostracism of the Truth is reminiscent of the London Times’ et al. total silence regarding the huge gap in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In Stephen C. Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, 2013; p. 7, he reminds us that the world’s most renowned paleontologist, Louis Agassiz, of Harvard University, pointed out several discrepancies in Darwin’s Theory. He was joined by several other leading experts on the subject. All were pigeon-holed in their careers for bucking the media’s support of Darwin’s incorrect theory.
