50 Fun Facts About Jonas Salk

Which singer rolled up his sleeve for Salk's polio vaccine in front of reporters in October 1956?

Elvis Presley: he took the shot in New York a few hours before headlining The Ed Sullivan Show, handing the vaccine drive the biggest teen idol in America.

Asked by Ed Murrow who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Salk replied, 'Could you patent' what?

The sun: the vaccine, he said, belonged to the people. The foundation that paid for it had in fact looked into taking out a patent, then let the idea drop.

Cells taken from which cancer patient in 1951 were mass-produced to test Salk's polio vaccine?

Henrietta Lacks: her HeLa cells were easily infected by poliovirus, so a cell factory was set up at Tuskegee in 1953 to ship them to the laboratories checking the vaccine.

Where was Salk born on October 28, 1914?

New York City: born in East Harlem to parents with little schooling of their own, he was pushed to study hard and became the first in his family to go to college.

Before Salk's vaccine, which season did American parents dread as 'polio season'?

Summer: from 1916 an epidemic struck somewhere in the United States almost every year as the weather warmed, and children were warned off swimming pools and beaches.

Which charity's fundraising drives paid for Salk's vaccine research and its giant 1954 field trial?

March of Dimes: it began as the fund-raising appeal of the national polio foundation, and comedian Eddie Cantor coined the name as a pun on the newsreel The March of Time.

What career had Salk aspired to before his mother urged him toward medical school?

Lawyer: he dreamed of entering Congress to make just laws, but his mother doubted he would be any good at it, since he could never win an argument with her.

Which medical school admitted Salk when quotas on Jewish students nearly kept him out of the profession?

New York University: he enrolled with no intention of treating patients, wanting to become a researcher and help humankind 'in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis'.

The sugar-cube polio vaccine that followed Salk's injection inspired a song in which Disney film?

Mary Poppins: one of the Sherman brothers came home stuck for an idea, heard his small son had swallowed his vaccine on a cube of sugar, and turned up next morning with 'A Spoonful of Sugar'.

Salk's mentor Thomas Francis set him to work in World War II on an Army vaccine against which disease?

Influenza: the vaccine he and Francis made for the Army used killed virus, the approach Salk later carried over to polio against the advice of most experts.

Where did Salk accept a professorship in 1947 and build the lab that produced the polio vaccine?

University of Pittsburgh: the laboratory he was given was small and ill equipped, so he went looking for outside backers, and Mellon family grants rebuilt it into a leading virus research centre.

Which animals did Salk protect with his polio vaccine before he dared to try it on people?

Monkeys: their kidney cells also supplied the cultures in which he grew the virus for the vaccine, a new method that meant it no longer had to be raised in live animals.

Which chemical did Salk use to kill the poliovirus in his vaccine, rather than merely weakening it?

Formaldehyde: the step had to be done perfectly, as the country learned in 1955, when one maker's vaccine still held live virus and paralysed children.

Which trial design, now standard for new medicines, was used in Salk's 1954 field trial?

Double-blind: in the areas where half the children were given a harmless placebo instead, neither they nor the people injecting them knew who had got real vaccine.

What were the children who took part in the 1954 field trial of Salk's vaccine known as?

The Polio Pioneers: eminent virologists were still arguing that the vaccine should be held back, yet there was no shortage of parents volunteering their children.

Which president founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which paid for Salk's vaccine research?

Franklin D. Roosevelt: diagnosed with the disease at 39 and left paralysed, he launched the foundation from the White House, and the vaccine's success was announced ten years to the day after his death.

Who developed the oral polio vaccine that largely replaced Salk's injected one in the 1960s?

Albert Sabin: his live-virus drops, swallowed in syrup or on a sugar cube, were cheaper to make and needed no needle, and by the end of the 1960s they had pushed Salk's shots aside in America.

On the night his vaccine was declared safe, Ed Murrow told Salk a 'great tragedy' had befallen him: losing his what?

Anonymity: Salk said he felt like someone in the eye of a hurricane, suddenly treated as a public hero and no longer free to spend his time as he chose.

How soon after the 1955 news that it worked did the US government license Salk's vaccine?

The same day: the licence followed the announcement by hours, and the haste told weeks later, when one firm's badly made batches gave children polio and vaccinations were halted.

What did Jon Cohen say happened when Salk boarded an aeroplane?

Pilots announced him and passengers applauded: Cohen added that hotels would bump him up to their penthouse suites and that admirers interrupted his restaurant meals.

What did Salk say belonged "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary"?

Making money: true to his word, he sought no profit from the vaccine, which went to the drug makers unpatented so that it could spread as fast as possible.

In which San Diego neighbourhood did the Salk Institute for Biological Studies open in 1963?

La Jolla: a San Diego mayor who had survived polio lobbied Salk to build there, and the city's voters approved handing him the clifftop site for nothing in a 1960 referendum.

Which architect designed the Salk Institute, a bare-concrete landmark above the Pacific?

Louis Kahn: Salk wanted a campus beautiful enough to lure the world's best researchers, and Kahn gave him two stark laboratory blocks facing each other across an open court that frames the ocean.

Which co-discoverer of DNA's structure was a Salk Institute professor until his death in 2004?

Francis Crick: he swapped genes for the brain there, spending his last decades on the riddle of human consciousness, and was the institute's president when Salk died.

Polio, the target of Salk's vaccine, is named from the Greek for which colour, that of the spinal tissue it inflames?

Grey: the full name, poliomyelitis, joins the Greek words for grey and marrow, because the virus inflames the grey matter of the spinal cord, killing the nerve cells that work the muscles.

Which disease did Salk spend his last decade trying to beat with a vaccine for people already infected?

AIDS: he co-founded a company to make Remune, built from killed HIV in the spirit of his polio shot, but trials showed little benefit and it was dropped years after his death.

Why did the United States switch back from oral drops to Salk's injected vaccine in the late 1990s?

It cannot cause polio: the live virus in the drops could, on rare occasions, regain its strength and paralyse a child, the risk Salk had warned of all his life.

Salk had no middle name until 1939, when who insisted he adopt one before his wedding?

His future father-in-law: a wealthy Manhattan dentist who thought Salk beneath his daughter, he also made the couple wait until 'M.D.' could go on the invitations; hence Jonas Edward Salk.

Salk's second wife, the painter Françoise Gilot, had spent a decade as which artist's partner?

Pablo Picasso: she had walked out on him and published a bestselling memoir he went to court to stop; she and Salk married quietly in Paris in 1970 to dodge the press.

Besides himself, whom did Salk inject with his experimental polio vaccine in 1953?

His wife and sons: he boiled the needles and syringes on the kitchen stove and gave Donna and the three boys their shots at home, a year before the national trial began.

Which president, handing Salk a citation in the White House Rose Garden, said he had no words to thank him?

Dwight D. Eisenhower: his citation called Salk a benefactor of mankind for sharing his seed virus and know-how with scientists abroad, so that every country could make the vaccine.

Which president presented Salk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977?

Jimmy Carter: he honoured only two men that day, Salk and, posthumously, Martin Luther King Jr., and said the medal could add nothing to Salk's true honours.

Salk wanted his institute to bridge the 'two cultures' by bringing scientists together with thinkers from which field?

The humanities: C. P. Snow had warned that scientists and literary thinkers knew little of each other's work and could barely talk to one another, and Salk hoped a shared campus would close the gap.

Which annual observance, held each October 24, was created to honour Salk's birth?

World Polio Day: the date is four days out, since Salk was born on October 28, but the day now rallies support each year for wiping the disease out worldwide.

At which university did Thomas Francis announce in April 1955 that Salk's vaccine worked?

University of Michigan: Francis, Salk's old mentor, had directed the trial from Ann Arbor, and the news conference there set off celebrations across the country.

Which actor-director, himself a childhood polio survivor, made a 2014 documentary about the Salk Institute?

Robert Redford: he remembered the arrival of the vaccine as 'earth-shattering news', and his short 3-D film was one of six on landmark buildings in the series Cathedrals of Culture.

Which machine, a sealed tank worked by air pressure, kept the worst-hit polio patients alive before Salk's vaccine?

The iron lung: the first one, built at Harvard in 1928, ran on an electric motor and the pumps of two vacuum cleaners, raising and lowering the pressure to work the patient's chest.

Which honour always eluded Salk, though it went in 1954 to the scientists whose virus-growing method he used?

The Nobel Prize: John Enders and two Harvard colleagues won it for showing that poliovirus would grow in ordinary tissue culture, the step that let Salk produce enough virus for a vaccine.

Salk's brother Lee became a popular author in which field?

Child psychology: Lee Salk made his name in 1960 by showing that the sound of a mother's heartbeat calms a newborn, and went on to write eight books of advice for families.

Salk's successors hope to make polio the second human disease ever eradicated; which one was the first?

Smallpox: it was declared eradicated in 1980, and polio can follow because its virus has no animal host to hide in between human victims.

Where was the rival oral vaccine that later replaced Salk's put through its giant field trial in the late 1950s?

The Soviet Union: with Salk's shots already in use there was no room for another great American trial, so the drops were taken across the Cold War divide and tried on children there on a massive scale.

Which library holds hundreds of boxes of Salk's personal papers?

The Geisel Library at UC San Diego: the campus is the Salk Institute's next-door neighbour, and the papers began arriving in his lifetime, thank-you letters from the world's schoolchildren among them.

How did Salk tell the American public in March 1953 that his early human tests had worked?

In a national radio broadcast: he went on air two days before his paper appeared in a medical journal, hoping to head off sensational newspaper stories about a cure.

The Polio Hall of Fame, whose bronze busts include Salk's, stands in which Georgia town?

Warm Springs: its naturally heated pools had long made it a treatment centre for polio patients, and Salk was among the scientists who came to see the wall of busts unveiled in 1958.

Which BBC series was written and presented by Jacob Bronowski, a founding fellow of the Salk Institute?

The Ascent of Man: Bronowski, a mathematician who had turned to the life sciences, made the 1973 series while working at the institute, and died the year after it was shown.

Salk received a 1975 award 'for International Understanding' named after which Indian leader?

Jawaharlal Nehru: a line from Salk's acceptance speech, 'Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality', is now set in gold at his institute's entrance.

Which physicist who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction later helped found the Salk Institute?

Leo Szilard: he had turned from physics to biology after the war, and spent his last years as a fellow of the institute he had helped to create.

Which service club has raised funds to wipe out polio worldwide since launching PolioPlus in 1985?

Rotary International: its members began by vaccinating children in the Philippines, and have since given more than two billion dollars to the campaign.

In 2020, which region became the fifth of the WHO's six to be certified free of wild polio?

Africa: its last wild case had been found in Nigeria four years earlier, and the certificate left the wild virus entrenched in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After polio, which disease of the nervous system did Salk spend much of the 1970s trying to treat?

Multiple sclerosis: he saw it as the immune system attacking the body's own tissue and joined a trial of a protein therapy, but, like his work on cancer, it brought no breakthrough.