Jonas Salk Trivia
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50 free Jonas Salk trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jonas Salk was a Bronx-raised son of immigrants who never wanted to practise medicine, backed the "killed" poliovirus when the field favoured live vaccines, injected his own children with the result, and on April 12, 1955 became the most famous scientist in America overnight. He refused to patent it ("Could you patent the sun?"), fled the fame to build a research institute on a Californian bluff, married Picasso's former mistress and spent his last decade chasing an AIDS vaccine. This quiz covers the vaccine, the man and the myths. Easy questions ask which disease he tackled and what he told Ed Murrow about the patent. Harder ones want the school that crammed four years into three, the mentor who introduced him to virology, the first children he injected in 1952, the name given to the million children in the 1954 trial, the rival with the oral vaccine, the architect of the Salk Institute, the drug he patented for AIDS and the day named for his birthday. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Jonas Salk, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for biology teachers, medical students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Medicine, Vaccines and Famous Scientists.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which singer rolled up his sleeve for Salk's polio vaccine in front of reporters in October 1956?
Elvis Presley
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.
Q 02Asked by Ed Murrow who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Salk replied, 'Could you patent' what?
The sun
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.
Q 03Cells taken from which cancer patient in 1951 were mass-produced to test Salk's polio vaccine?
Henrietta Lacks
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.
Q 04Where was Salk born on October 28, 1914?
New York City
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.
Q 05Before Salk's vaccine, which season did American parents dread as 'polio season'?
Summer
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.
Q 06Which charity's fundraising drives paid for Salk's vaccine research and its giant 1954 field trial?
March of Dimes
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.
Q 07What career had Salk aspired to before his mother urged him toward medical school?
Lawyer
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.
Q 08Which medical school admitted Salk when quotas on Jewish students nearly kept him out of the profession?
New York University
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'.
Q 09The sugar-cube polio vaccine that followed Salk's injection inspired a song in which Disney film?
Mary Poppins
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'.
Q 10Salk's mentor Thomas Francis set him to work in World War II on an Army vaccine against which disease?
Influenza
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.
Q 11Where did Salk accept a professorship in 1947 and build the lab that produced the polio vaccine?
University of Pittsburgh
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.
Q 12Which animals did Salk protect with his polio vaccine before he dared to try it on people?
Monkeys
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.
Q 13Which chemical did Salk use to kill the poliovirus in his vaccine, rather than merely weakening it?
Formaldehyde
Q 21What did Salk say belonged "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary"?
Making money
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.
Q 22In which San Diego neighbourhood did the Salk Institute for Biological Studies open in 1963?
La Jolla
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.
Q 23Which architect designed the Salk Institute, a bare-concrete landmark above the Pacific?
Louis Kahn
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.
Q 14Which trial design, now standard for new medicines, was used in Salk's 1954 field trial?
Double-blind
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.
Q 15What were the children who took part in the 1954 field trial of Salk's vaccine known as?
The Polio Pioneers
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.
Q 16Which president founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which paid for Salk's vaccine research?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 17Who developed the oral polio vaccine that largely replaced Salk's injected one in the 1960s?
Albert Sabin
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.
Q 18On the night his vaccine was declared safe, Ed Murrow told Salk a 'great tragedy' had befallen him: losing his what?
Anonymity
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.
Q 19How soon after the 1955 news that it worked did the US government license Salk's vaccine?
The same day
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.
Q 20What did Jon Cohen say happened when Salk boarded an aeroplane?
Pilots announced him and passengers applauded
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.
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.
Q 24Which co-discoverer of DNA's structure was a Salk Institute professor until his death in 2004?
Francis Crick
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.
Q 25Polio, the target of Salk's vaccine, is named from the Greek for which colour, that of the spinal tissue it inflames?
Grey
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.
Q 26Which disease did Salk spend his last decade trying to beat with a vaccine for people already infected?
AIDS
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.
Q 27Why did the United States switch back from oral drops to Salk's injected vaccine in the late 1990s?
It cannot cause polio
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.
Q 28Salk had no middle name until 1939, when who insisted he adopt one before his wedding?
His future father-in-law
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.
Q 29Salk's second wife, the painter Françoise Gilot, had spent a decade as which artist's partner?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 30Besides himself, whom did Salk inject with his experimental polio vaccine in 1953?
His wife and sons
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.