Word: salk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...York City garmentworker, Salk was introduced to viral research as a medical student at New York University in the 1930s. After receiving his degree he moved to the University of Michigan to work with Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., one of his former professors. There he helped to develop commercial vaccines against influenza that were used by American troops during World...
After the war Salk headed the viral-research program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he gradually devoted his studies to polio. When he began his work, medical wisdom held that vaccines, to be effective, should use live viruses that had been rendered harmless in the laboratory. Salk believed it would be possible to make a vaccine using killed viruses; this method, he thought, was preferable since it carried less risk of actually causing the disease the vaccine was meant to prevent. When animal tests on an experimental vaccine proved successful, he moved on to human tests in which...
That America's greatest hero was for a time a man in a white lab coat might have delighted Salk's peers in medical research. Instead many of them resented him as a man who reaped the glory for work that had been pioneered by less celebrated scientists all around the world. By 1962 Dr. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, derived from live viruses, had become the preferred method of inoculation in the U.S., and Sabin was bitter about Salk's earlier triumph. Just a few years before his own death in 1993 Sabin claimed that "Salk didn't discover...
...Salk was able to realize a lifelong dream when he became director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at a magnificent compound designed by Louis Kahn, on an oceanfront promontory in La Jolla, California. It attracted scientists in many fields to pursue biomedical research. In 1970, two years after divorcing his first wife, Salk married Francoise Gilot, the onetime companion and muse of Pablo Picasso and mother of two of Picasso's children...
When a new epidemic emerged in the 1980s, AIDS, Salk plunged into the effort to find a vaccine that would prevent people who are already infected with HIV from progressing to the full-blown disease. Though many scientists remain skeptical of Salk's approach, small-scale tests are under...