Jonas Salk led a team at the University of Pittsburgh to develop the first safe and effective vaccine for poliomyelitis in the mid-1950s. Upon the vaccine's success, Salk chose not to patent it, which could have made him immense personal wealth. When asked on television in 1955 who owned the patent, Salk famously responded, "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?". This decision prioritized global access, helping to dramatically reduce polio cases worldwide.
Dr. Salk was instrumental in the creation of the March of Dimes, which was headquartered in New York City. My paternal Grandmother was his secretary there. That's how I knew about it. Pretty somethin', huh?
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Yep I knew that. We got the shot when I was in kindergarten. Pissed the doctor off when I tried to pull it out. Later it was oral. Only knew one guy who got polio, had leg braces and was a bully. Threw sand in my eyes once just to be mean.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that Salk could not patent the vaccine as it depended on the work of others:
ReplyDelete"The scientific establishment honored him with the Albert Lasker Award in 1956, and the government gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But he never received the Nobel Prize, and the National Academy of Sciences never admitted him to membership.
Sven Gard, the Swedish virologist who influenced the Nobel Committee, wrote in his 1956 evaluation that Salk “has not in the development of his methods introduced anything that is principally new, but only exploited discoveries made by others.” The 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went instead to John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins, who had discovered how to grow poliovirus in tissue culture—the breakthrough that made Salk’s work possible.