WHILE I WAS attending the University of California at San Diego the singular view beckoned. There just a block s walk away was the Salk Institute perched like a pearl above the Pacific. There as if squatting before a runway you could watch people sprint and hurl themselves off the cliff top sometimes dipping precipitously toward the waves over and down till the Western gusts breathed new life beneath the hang glider and the curving and wind carving thermal dance began.
Each such leap into the breeze seemed like not only an act of a certain courage but also of confidence that your limbs would not fail you now. And it felt perfect that these trips of faith were launched so close to the institute named for the scientifically sure footed pioneer whose vaccine saved so many limbs and so many lives.
Salk on the March 29 1954 cover of Time magazine.When I first began walking to the Salk site in the 90s you could still spot the man himself there in La Jolla in his 70s and several decades removed from his initial work that would land him on magazine covers as an international hero. His legacy was not only larger than life but was also precisely about the fragility of life itself.
As so many tens of thousands of children suffered from polio into midcentury his vaccine began as the stuff of dreams by the mid 50s it was the substance of a profoundly life altering reality.
Dr. Salk had begun his journey a coast away he got his medical degree in 1939 at the New York University School of Medicine and was working at the city s Mount Sinai Hospital before a research fellowship at the University of Michigan with his mentor beckoned. In 1947 he moved to head up the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine s Virus Research Laboratory where he did the real groundbreaking work in his march toward a vaccine for paralytic poliomyelitis or polio.
The goal of course was to trigger the body s own defenses so it would build immunity against the disease. Salk believed that antibodies could be produced by injecting not a live virus but rather a deactivated (non infectious) one.
At this point enough necessary tumblers clicked into place. For one the team of Harvard scientist John Enders solved how to grow the pure poliovirus in the test tube a crucial step that enabled Salk s effective experimentation with a killed virus. And then there were the needed funds Salk got backing from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation).
In 1954 at least 1 million children the Polio Pioneers were tested across the nation (this followed testing that ranged from monkeys to Salk s own family). The vaccine was announced as safe and largely effective on April 12 1955.
In the two years before the vaccine was widely available the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than 45 000 according to the Salk Institute. By 1962 that number had dropped to 910.
Salk the overnight hero received a special citation from President Eisenhower but he refused to patent his would be lucrative vaccine (the Salk vaccine was eventually replaced by Albert Sabin s cheaper live virus vaccine). On the day his vaccine was announced as safe Salk told the legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow There is no patent. Could you patent the sun
In the 60s Salk built his La Jolla biological studies center his dream institute where he helped lead research on cancer immunology multiple sclerosis and autoimmune diseases as well as on development of an AIDS vaccine.
Jonas Edward Salk was born on this day a century ago in New York. Google celebrates the 100th anniversary of his birth today with a warm hearted home page Doodle by gifted artist Mike Dutton featuring a sidewalk gathering of grateful children.
Dr. Salk who was married to social worker Donna Lindsay and later to artist Francoise Gilot (a past love of Pablo Picasso s) died June 23 1995 at his La Jolla home. He was 80.
And there in La Jolla near where nimble limbed hang gliders launch against the backdrop of the institute s sun bleached concrete resides a memorial to Salk the pioneer the hero the icon. It reads Hope lies in dreams in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.
The words like the achievements are his.
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