How Jonas Salk Helped Tame Polio: A Story of Braces, Iron Lungs and Unpatented Suns

If you chat to anyone who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are they’ll remember the grim terror that was polio. It was a disease that lurked silently each summer, striking down children, paralysing limbs, and sometimes leaving little ones encased in the eerie metal barrel known as the iron lung. Parents dreaded the word poliomyelitis, the technical label for a vicious virus that attacked the spinal cord’s motor neurons, stealing movement, independence, and too often, lives.

Fast forward to today, and it’s almost hard to grasp just how close the world is to saying goodbye to polio altogether, and for that, we owe an enormous debt to Jonas Salk, a quiet but determined doctor who decided that saving lives mattered more than making a fortune.

The Boy Who Didn’t Fancy Biology

Jonas Edward Salk entered the world on 28 October 1914, in New York City. His parents were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, with no fancy degrees to hang on the wall — but they knew the power of education and pushed young Jonas and his brothers to hit the books harder than most kids on their block.

Dora Press Salk and Daniel Salk with sons Herman, Jonas, and Lee. Jonas inherited his mother’s work ethic and learned how to maneuver around her iron will, a skill that would help him later when confronted by the politics of science; Jonas Salk had few fond memories of childhood. By the time Jonas entered high school, he was a driven, focused, serious individual.

Ironically, Salk didn’t have much patience for biology lessons at school. He once admitted that dissecting frogs or memorising organ names bored him silly. What did spark his curiosity was people themselves — why we behave the way we do, how the mind works, and how fragile the human body can be.

As he once put it in his own words:

“I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That’s what motivates me.”

From Law School Dreams to Pandemic-Fighting Scientist

Young Jonas first thought he’d become a lawyer — until his mother dryly pointed out that if he couldn’t win an argument with her, he’d never win one in court. He took her advice to heart, pivoted to medicine and enrolled at New York University School of Medicine. There, in the thick of World War Two, he got his first taste of disease research, helping his mentor Dr Thomas Francis develop an influenza vaccine for the US Army.

Fresh out of his fellowship, Salk was itching for his next challenge. Polio was the obvious foe — the disease was ravaging children by the tens of thousands each year, with no cure in sight. So, in 1947, he took up a post as director of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh and got to work.

Breaking the Rules: How to Kill a Virus and Save a Life

Back then, the scientific rulebook said you needed a live but weakened version of a virus to build a vaccine. Salk didn’t buy it. He figured that a dead virus, if killed carefully enough, could teach the immune system to fight the real thing without any risk of infection. He’d already tested this approach for flu, so why not polio?

Plenty of his peers scoffed at him, dismissing his methods as simplistic or unsafe. But Salk pressed on, backed by generous funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis — a charity started by none other than Franklin D Roosevelt, himself a polio survivor. (You might know it better today as the March of Dimes.)

Dr Salk in his lab

In his lab, Salk’s team carefully killed off the poliovirus with formaldehyde, preserving just enough of its structure to trigger immunity. He wasn’t content with lab rats: Salk, his wife and even their kids rolled up their sleeves to get vaccinated first. Then came the big test — a nationwide trial involving more than a million American children.

On 12 April 1955, the world got the news: Salk’s vaccine worked. Cases of polio in the US nosedived from nearly 30,000 in 1955 to under 6,000 two years later. By the end of the decade, the jab was in use in 90 countries, turning polio from a summer nightmare into a near relic of the past.

Trouble in Paradise: Cutter Labs and Sabin’s Sugar Cube

But no great victory story is without a hiccup. In 1955, batches of the vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories slipped through safety checks, some viruses hadn’t been fully killed. Around 250 children developed paralytic polio from these bad batches, causing a nationwide scare.

Meanwhile, another scientist, Dr Albert Sabin, was quietly working on his own version: a live but weakened virus given orally on a sugar cube. Sabin’s version was cheaper, easier to give to kids, and spread immunity quickly through communities. It was first tested on millions of children in the Soviet Union — a curious twist, given the Cold War chill, and by 1961, the Sabin oral vaccine largely overtook Salk’s injected one in popularity.

April 23, 1955: Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the vaccine that is believed to have struck the death knell of polio, as he received a special citation from President Dwight David Eisenhower in the White House Rose Garden. The President praised the young doctor as a “benefactor of mankind” and said that his work was in the “highest tradition of selfless and dedicated research.”

A Scientist Who Refused a Patent

Despite changing medical history, Salk didn’t get a Nobel Prize or even a seat at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, some say he ruffled too many feathers by overshadowing fellow researchers or not giving enough credit to others, like John Enders and his colleagues who’d cracked how to grow poliovirus in human tissue.

Still, Salk left the world something money can’t buy. When a reporter asked him who owned the patent for the vaccine, he famously replied:

“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” 

His answer summed up exactly how he saw science — as a public good, not a private goldmine.

Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso in 1948. Gilot was an accomplished artist and Picasso’s muse for nearly a decade. In 1970, Gilot found love with Jonas Salk.

Life Beyond the Lab: La Jolla, Picasso’s Muse and a Lasting Legacy

In his personal life, Salk found love and heartbreak like anyone else. He married his college sweetheart, Donna Lindsay, in 1939. They had three sons who all carved out their own careers in science and medicine. After the marriage ended in 1968, Salk surprised many by marrying Françoise Gilot, the artist once famously involved with Pablo Picasso. The pair settled in sun-drenched La Jolla, California, where Salk built the renowned Salk Institute, an architectural masterpiece and a haven for bright scientific minds, including DNA pioneer Francis Crick.

Jonas Salk kept working, writing and speaking about human health and ethics until his death from heart failure in 1995.

The Salk Institute

So, Is Polio Really Gone?

Polio is mostly a ghost now, wiped out from North America by 1994 and from most of the planet soon after. But a ghost it stubbornly remains: pockets of resistance, mistrust and conspiracy theories mean outbreaks still flare up, especially in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. One strange twist came in 2011 when the CIA used a fake vaccination campaign as cover while hunting Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, fuelling fear and myths that the vaccine causes infertility.

But thanks to Salk’s simple but powerful idea, generations of children now run and play without fear of braces, iron lungs or polio’s cruel grip. And perhaps that’s the real measure of his legacy: a world where a word that once struck terror is now mostly a footnote.

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