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Jonas Salk Accomplishments

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“Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality” (Jonas Salk). This was Jonas Salk’s life philosophy: what can I dream and turn into reality. Jonas Salk was one of the leading scientists on the study of diseases in the human body. He is credited with many vaccinations for illnesses, some life threatening, including polio. In this paper I will be discussing the life and work of Jonas Salk, and what he did for the field of Science. Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914 in New York City. He was born to Daniel and Dora Salk, Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was the eldest of three sons, and he was the first in his family to attend college. He grew up very poor, but his parents stressed the …show more content…

In the 1950s America was struck with the poliovirus epidemic with thousands of children being infected with the crippling disease. He made a virus that made him world renown overnight, but this was the end result of many years of research (Achievement). Salk went against the grain in his development of the Polio vaccine. He developed a killed-virus and then deactivated them by adding formaldehyde, which made the virus unable to reproduce. When benign strains were injected into the bloodstream the vaccine tricked the immune system into making protective antibodies to kill off the virus (Klein). Other scientists were skeptical of Salk’s approach in the creation of this …show more content…

People knew that the virus had the ability to paralyze humans and possibly lead to death. What the people did not take into account was the fact that the virus was not the leading cause of deaths in Americans during the 1940s and 1950s, yet it was portrayed so horribly because of the possibility of the crippling effects it had on the human body. In polls taken by the American public following World War II, the only thing that Americans feared more than the poliovirus was Nuclear War (Klein). Knowledge of this disease has changed minimally from the time of Salk’s discovery. One notable change in the poliovirus vaccine since its inception is when the live-virus vaccine came out, it was used more than the killed-virus vaccine because it was cheaper and easier to distribute. The results were the same, but Jonas Salk solved the majority of cases of polio with his vaccine in the 1950s. As a result of the poliovirus vaccines, the disease was nearly eradicated from the world. In 2014, the spread of the poliovirus started to come back in small quantities. The reason being that parents are not vaccinating their children. These were soon eradicated, but with this small sample size you can see how deadly the virus can be (NY

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