Word: salk
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...that is hard to remember, because by the time of Salk's death last week, of heart failure at the age of 80, polio was virtually gone from the U.S. and nearing extinction throughout the world. The beginning of the end for the virus can be dated precisely. On April 12, 1955, a Salk colleague announced that a vaccine developed by Salk and tested on more than 1 million schoolchildren had proved "safe, effective and potent." As a result of the nationwide effort of mass inoculation that followed, new cases in the U.S. dropped to fewer than...
That triumph made Salk one of the most celebrated men of the 1950s. Streets and schools were named for him; in polls he ranked with Gandhi and Churchill as a hero of modern history. Though his fame was expertly fostered by the public-relations machinery of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and its March of Dimes campaign, which helped finance Salk's work, national adulation was still an unexpected fate for a dedicated scientist in an unglamorous field...
...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...