September 10th Rare Autographs, Books and Sports
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/10/2020
Jonas Edward Salk (October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine, later choosing to do medical research instead of becoming a practicing physician. He began an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 1939. Two years later, he was granted a fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he spent several years studying flu viruses with his mentor, Thomas Francis Jr. In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948 with funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Salk saw an opportunity to extend this project towards developing a vaccine against polio, and he gathered a research team and devoted himself to this work for the next seven years. The field trial set up to test the Salk vaccine was, according to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers." Over 1.8 million schoolchildren took part in the trial. Before the Salk vaccine was introduced in 1955, polio was considered one of the most serious public health problems in the world, and epidemics were increasingly devastating in the post-war United States. The 1952 U.S. epidemic, in which 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with some form of paralysis, was the worst polio outbreak in the nation's history, and most of its victims were children. According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio." News of the vaccine's success was first made public on April 12, 1955. Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker", and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. Less than 25 years later, domestic transmission of polio had been completely eliminated in the United States. In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.With One Of A Kind Collectibles COA.
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