Jonas Salk
"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
Well, I don't know if you follow the news or not, but basically the entire city of Seattle is on lockdown right now, and the entire insane thing is happening so close by that I can't throw a baseball from my cubicle without hitting someone wearing a gas mask. Emerald City Comicon is postponed, most of the flights out of town are canceled, the streets are freakishly quiet, the schools and universities are closing down for the rest of the month, and I wouldn't recommend trying to buy toilet paper at Costco unless you're packing a katana, a suit of power armor, and a handful of whatever performance-enhancing drugs the Doom Marine uses to break demons' skulls apart by squeezing his index finger and thumb together really hard. It's nuts. I'm basically washing my hands like my OCD is three standard deviations more extreme than it already is, mixing in Purell with my morning vodka, and my general plan for the weekend is to just kinda perch like Smaug the Dragon on top of a giant pile of beef jerky, Advil, and buckshot in case this whole situation goes Andromeda Strain on me.
Anyway, the sudden and imminent threat of untimely death by horrifying virulent plague got me thinking, and it seems like this is as good a time as any to talk about a guy who deserves to be called a Badass not because he lugged an LMG around some hard-to-pronounce forest on another continent, but because his enemy was a lethal, crippling contagion that had been mutilating and destroying human lives since before the dawn of civilization – a vicious, unfeeling, unintelligent virus designed only to infect, paralyze, and kill – and he not only found a way to prevent it from being the most terrifying disease in America, but managed to virtually eradicate its presence from the face of the earth, saving millions of lives – mostly children – in the process.
This is the tale of Jonas Salk – the man who destroyed polio, became an American hero, and then walked away from a five billion dollar payday because he didn't believe that his vaccine should be patented and should instead be available to everyone in the world.
To understand Salk we first need to take a minute and talk about how super omega screwed-up polio was, and how badly it was kicking everyones' asses back in the early days of the 20th century. Nowadays polio sounds more like a collared work shirt than a vicious debilitating death sentence, but this disease had been seriously wrecking people since basically the dawn of human existence. Like, there are steles in Ancient Egypt depicting people whose legs were warped and wrecked from childhood polio.
Basically, the disease worked like this – the poliovirus would infect mostly children, generally between the ages of five and nine, and would immediately start multiplying and causing inflammation throughout the body. It started with fever and headache, then fatigue, then paralysis, generally in the legs first. Kids would be laid up in bed for months, sometimes even a year or more, and the paralysis would often mess up your legs permanently, making them weak and twisting them into shapes so gnarly that I don't want to put pictures of it up with this article. After that, the disease would progress to the respiratory system, paralyzing your lungs and chest, and you died by freaking suffocation because your body was too paralyzed to breathe. I can think of few things that sound worse than that.
If that's not horrific enough, this disease was also incredibly contagious, and by the mid-1900s it was spreading at an unbelievable rate. Between the 1940s and 50s nearly a million people a year worldwide were dying or being permanently paralyzed by the contagion. In the United States alone, nearly 58,000 kids developed the disease in 1952 – about 3,000 of them died, and another 21,000 were permanently paralyzed. Not only that, but if you did manage to overcome the illness, there is something called post-polio syndrome which is basically where the disease comes out of remission 15-20 years later and kicks your ass AGAIN. This horrible illness not only hit US President Franklin Roosevelt back in the 30s, but it also affected people like Donald Sutherland, Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Young, Jack Nicklaus, Frida Kahlo and a bunch of other people that would make you think, "oh damn, that wasn't so long ago."
Even worse, there was no cure for the disease, and no way of removing its effects once they’ve taken hold. There still isn't.
But there is a vaccine against it.
this 4,000 year old guy’s right foot is messed up because it’s been paralyzed by polio.
Kids wearing the Forrest Gump leg things, doing PT to try and gain some strength back.
A hospital ward full of people in Iron Lungs because they're too paralyzed to breathe on their own.
Jonas Salk was born in New York City on October 28, 1914 – a date that is now commemorated as World Polio Day thanks to his contributions to humanity. He was a smart kid, skipped a few grades, entered City College of New York at age 15 and went to NYU Med School after that. In 1938 he went to work with Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Francis was the first person to isolate the influenza strain and discover that there were multiple variations on the flu virus, and Salk was part of the team that helped develop the flu vaccine that was distributed to American troops during World War II.
Salk worked at Mount Sinai Hospital as a researcher for a while, and then in 1947 he got his own virology lab at the University of Pittsburgh. A year later he was contacted by Harry Weaver, the director of research for the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis – a group that has since been renamed the March of Dimes, probably because the primary cause of infantile paralysis was almost completely exterminated thanks to this partnership.
Salk received a big grant from Weaver, and his original job was pretty simple – we knew there were three different strains of Poliovirus, and Salk was supposed to figure out if there were additional strains that we didn't know about yet. He received office space, equipment, and staff, and went to work immediately, but Salk's goal wasn't just to identify — it was to claw this scourge from the face of the earth.
choose the form of your destroyer
I'm not going to pretend to know shit about microbiology here, and any attempt I make at crafting an exciting, nail-biting back-and-forth struggle to create the Polio vaccine is only going to disastrously highlight the fact that I'm a dude who barely passed Biology for Liberal Arts Majors in college, so I'll just keep this as general as I can – a lot of people at the time were working with live polio in their vaccine attempts, but the problem with that is that you run a risk of infecting the patient with the vaccine you're trying to give them. Salk used "killed" polio, which, I assume is non-living polio viruses, and he soon realized that you could not only inject those cells into a person without infecting them, but that it caused the body to start producing antibodies that would prevent future infections. It's basically how all vaccines work – they just inject you with a super-weak version of the disease so your body learns to fight it, and then when the Real Deal shows up your T-cells have all been doing push-ups and studying game film and they didn't skip leg day so they can kick the shit out of the virus.
Anyway, the point is that Dr. Jonas Salk pushed himself to his absolute limit, busting his ass night and day, and, ultimately, he figured it out. He tested it on animals, and, when that works, this dude was so hardcore he injected it on HIMSELF as one of the first human subjects. Luckily for him, his theory was right, and he didn’t inadvertendly cripple himself by injecting a massively-lethal virus directly into his bloodstream. Testing rolled out in earnest in 1952, and in 1954 a program called Polio Pioneers injected one million kids, ages six to nine, across the United States with the still-experimental polio vaccine.
My Mom was one of them.
Dr. Salk worked basically without sleep for the next 2+ years rolling this miracle vaccine out to everyone in the world. A huge effort involving millions of people across the United States went into motion, inoculating every kid they could jab a needle into, until by the 1960s the entire disease had been virtually eradicated in the United States.
For reference, in 1954 roughly 45,000 kids in the United States became infected with the Poliovirus. In 2019, there were 33 new cases in the entire world. All of them were localized to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When Salk appeared on the popular late-night talk show See It Now, he was asked by Ed Murrow (the Good Night and Good Luck guy) who owned the patent on Salk's incredibel vaccine. Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
He never took any money or placed any patent on his creation, instead making the formula and all of the research behind it free for future researchers to use without restriction. Modern estimates on the value of the polio vaccine patent are somewhere in the range of seven billion dollars.
Salk was a national hero basically immediately. People cheered for him on airplanes, hotels gave him free upgrades, people wanted his autograph when he went out to dinner – and didn't like any of it, because, like a true badass, all he wanted to do was get back to work and cure some more shit. And that's what he did. In 1963 he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a complex of breathtakingly-ugly buildings in La Jolla, California dedicated to molecular and cellular biology. One of the top research institutes in the world for biomedicine, the Institute has had eleven Nobel Laureates on staff, and produced five more from within its ranks. Salk and his Institute have worked for decades on cures and vaccines for autoimmune disorders, cancer, HIV, Parkinsons, birth defects, and a whole range of other things that humanity still hasn't cured yet, and when he wasn't trying to find the weak spots of virtually-incurable illnesses he also wrote like a half-dozen books with his copious spare time. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, got his image on a postage stamp and a Google Doodle, has a dozen schools named after him, and was inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame, which, uh, I guess is a thing?
Dr. Jonas Salk passed away in 1995 at the age of 81 – a true brains-first badass who earned that title not by face-punching an onslaught of axe-wielding barbarians, but by saving millions of lives from a disease that crippled six year-olds and caused people to suffocate on their own collapsed lungs. He crushed out a pandemic that had ravaged and permanently-mutilated humanity for millennia, and then, like a real badass, he didn't want any money in return and got all annoyed and pissed-off when people tried to congratulate him for it.
“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.”