Father of Biophilosophy

Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914 in New York City. His parents, Daniel and Dora Salk, were from Russian-Jewish immigrant families. They were materially poor and lacked any formal education but urged their children to work and study hard. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a child psychologist. The Salk family moved from East Harlem to Queens and eventually to the Bronx.

When Jonas was 13 he entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. The high school was named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY) and it was a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money and status to attend a top private school. In high school Jonas was known as a “perfectionist who read everything he could lay his hands on”, according to one of his fellow students. The students at Townsend H.S. had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. Most students dropped or flunked out. The students who did graduate had the grades to enroll in CCNY, a highly competitive college. Jonas was the first sibling in his family to attend CCNY.

Salk enrolled in the City College of New York at the age of fifteen. At his mother’s urging he put aside his aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead signed up for the classes necessary for admission to medical school. What made CCNY special was the student body that fought so hard to get there. From the ranks of the 1930s and 1940s emerged a wealth of intellectual talent including more Nobel Prize winners and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkley. Salk earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1934.

Jonas Salk next entered the New York School of Medicine (NYU). NYU had a modest reputation based on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was comparatively low and it did not discriminate against Jews. Most of the surrounding medical schools- Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Yale- had rigid quotas. In 1935, for example, Yale accepted 76 applicants out of 501. Of the 501, 200 were Jewish and only five got in. During his years at NYU Salk stood out from his peers. He was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education. In his first year at NYU he decided that he did not want to practice medicine and instead became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. Later he focused more of his studies on bacteriology. It was the laboratory work that gave new direction to his life. Salk said, “My desire is to help humankind in general rather than single patients”.

In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Dr. Francis had discovered the Type B influenza virus while working for the Rockefeller Foundation. After his two-month stint in Francis’s lab, Salk was hooked. After graduating from medical school Dr. Salk began his residency at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital where he worked again in Francis’s laboratory. Few hospitals in Manhattan had the status of Mount Sinai, particularly among its Jewish citizens. Dr. Salk quickly made his mark. Even though he focused mainly on research he showed great skills as a clinician and a surgeon. His leadership as president of the house staff of interns and residents at Mount Sinai defined him best to his peers.

While he was attending medical school Jonas Salk met and fell in love with Donna Lindsay, a master’s candidate at New York College of Social Work. Her father, Elmer Lindsay, was a wealthy Manhattan dentist who viewed Salk as a social inferior. He agreed to their marriage on two conditions: First Salk had to wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his “rather pedestrian status” by giving himself a middle name. Dr. Jonas Edward Salk and Donna Lindsay were married the day after his graduation from medical school. Together they had three children: Peter, Darrell and Jonathan.

At the end of his residency Dr. Salk began applying for permanent research positions. Once again he found himself hindered due to Jewish quotas, which prevailed in much of the medical research establishment. He could not apply at Mount Sinai because their policy prevented hiring their own interns. As a last resort, he contacted Dr. Francis for help. Dr. Francis, who was now directing the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, secured extra grant money and offered Salk a job working on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. Eventually the two perfected a vaccine that was used at every U.S. army base. Dr. Salk was the one responsible for discovering and isolating the flu strains that were included in the final vaccine.

In 1947, Dr. Salk decided to find an institution where he could direct his own laboratory. Three institutions turned him down before he received an offer from William McEllroy, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The offer included a promise that he would run his own lab. But the promise was not quite what he envisioned. Dr. Salk was relegated to cramped, unequipped quarters in the basement of the old Municipal Hospital. As time went on, however, Dr. Salk began to secure grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory.

The director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis asked Dr. Salk if he would like to participate in the foundation’s polio project, which had been established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938. Paralytic poliomyelitis, “polio”, was a medical oddity that had baffled researchers for years. Polio was first recorded in 1835 and grew steadily over the years. During the start of the 20^th century, the 1914 and 1919 polio epidemics found U.S. physicians and nurses making house-to-house searches to identify all infected persons. Children suspected of being infected were taken to hospitals and the child’s family was quarantined. In 1921, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, former vice presidential candidate and soon to be governor of New York, came down with the paralytic illness it gained national attention. The fight against polio did not really get under way until the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was born. Basil O’Connor, the former law partner of President Roosevelt, headed it. That same year, the first March of Dimes fundraising program was begun. Radio networks offered free 30-second slots for promotion. Listeners were asked to send in a dime and the White House received 2,680,000 letters within days. Polio had become the most serious and frightening health problem of America’s postwar era. By 1952, polio was killing more children than any other communicable disease. Of the 58,000 cases reported in 1952, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. In some parts of the country the concern escalated to outright panic. The public reaction was to a plague. Scientists were in a frantic race to find a cure.

Salk was offered to participate in the polio project when the public’s fear was at its highest. The funds to combat it had increased from $1.8 million to $67 million. At that time everything scientists believed about polio was wrong, which led them down many blind alleys. Most researchers were experimenting with highly dangerous live vaccines. In one test six children were killed and three left crippled. Dr. Jonas Salk decided to use the safer killed virus. After successful tests on laboratory animals it next had to be tested on human beings. But who would take the risk? Dr. Salk and his family allowed themselves to be human guinea pigs. In November 1953, at a conference in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he said, “I will be personally responsible for the vaccine.” He announced that he, his wife and their three sons had been among the first volunteers to be inoculated with his vaccine.

It was then critical that Dr. Salk develop the trust of the U.S. public for his experiments and the mass tests that would become necessary. The field trial set up to test the vaccine developed by Dr. Salk and his research team was the most elaborate program of its kind in history. It involved 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel and 220,000 volunteers, with over 1,800,000 school children participating in the trial. More Americans had participated in the funding, development and testing of the polio vaccine than had participated in the nomination and election of the president. At least one hundred million people had contributed to the March of Dimes. Another seven million had donated their time and labor as well. With the hopes of the world upon him Dr. Salk worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years. Dr. Salk later described his endeavor as “two and a half years of drudgery and hard work”.

On April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis, the monitor of the test results, declared the vaccine to be “safe and effective”. The announcement was made at the University of Michigan exactly 10 years to the day after the death of President Roosevelt. Five hundred people, including press, radio and television reporters, filled the room. Fifty-four thousand physicians, sitting in movie theatres across the country, watched the broadcast on closed-circuit television. Americans turned on their radios to hear the news. Department stores set up loud speakers. Judges suspended trials so that everyone in the courtroom could hear. Dr. Francis reported that the vaccinations had been 80 to 90 percent effective. Overall, the vaccine was administered to over 440,000 children in forty-four states, three Canadian provinces and in Helsinki, Finland. The results were clear: the vaccine worked. After the announcement, when asked whether the effectiveness of the vaccine could be improved, Salk said, “Theoretically, the new 1955 vaccines and vaccination procedures may lead to 100 percent protection from paralysis of all those vaccineated.”

By the time Dr. Francis stepped down from the podium, church bells were ringing across the country. Factories observed moments of silence. Synagogues and churches held prayer meetings. Across the nation there were spontaneous celebrations. April 12^th had become a national holiday. Bells rang, horns honked, factory whistles blew, and salutes were fired. People took the rest of the day off from work. Schools were closed and the children sent home to celebrate with their families. Politicians around the country were falling all over themselves to find ways to congratulate Dr. Salk. In the Eisenhower White House, plans were started to present Dr. Salk with a special presidential medal designating him “a benefactor of mankind” in a Rose Garden ceremony. New York City could not get Dr. Salk to accept a ticker tape parade so instead they created eight “Jonas Salk Scholarships” for future medical students. Dr. Salk did eventually receive a Presidential Citation, the nation’s first Congressional Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service, and many other citations and medals. By July the movie studios were fighting for the motion picture rights to his film biography.

In the years following his polio vaccine discovery, many supporters, including the National Foundation, helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena “from cell to society”. It was called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and opened in 1963 in the San Diego, California neighborhood of La Jolla. The Salk Institute was something that he was deprived of early in his years of research, but due to his successes the institute was able to provide for future scientists. In the mid 1980s, Dr. Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for another more recent plague, AIDS. To further his research he co-founded the Immune Response Corporation to search for a vaccine. The AIDS vaccine project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Dr. Jonas Salk’s death on June 23, 1995.

Dr. Jonas Salk described his “biophilosophy” as the application of a “biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems”. His definition of a “biophilosopher” was “someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives”.

“We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.”- Dr. Jonas Salk

Jody Victor