How many cases make an epidemic? Survivors of the great polio
plagues of the 1940s and '50s will never believe that in the U.S.
the average toll in those years was "only" 1 victim out of every
5,000 people. Was that really all it took to scare the nation out
of its wits, sending families scurrying in all directions--to the
mountains, to the desert, to Europe--in vain hope of sanctuary. 

Perhaps polio's other name, infantile paralysis, had something to
do with it. Images of babies in wheelchairs and tots on crutches
tend to skew one's perception. And just in case anyone wasn't
scared enough, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
hammered the nightmare home with photos that seemed to show up
everywhere of sad-looking children in leg braces. "Please give to
the March of Dimes." Oh yes, indeed, five times at the same
movie--or so it sometimes felt.

It was inevitable that whoever was first to allay such fears
would become a national hero. "The Man Who Saved the Children"
should be good for a statue in every town in the world. And since
the odds of a microbiologist's becoming even a little bit famous
are a lot worse than 5,000 to 1, it was perhaps inevitable that
this hero's achievements would immediately be disputed. In a
scientific field so heavily manned, findings routinely crisscross
and even minor discoveries can leave a trail of claims and
counterclaims, not to mention envy and acrimony, that are truly 
incurable.

Thus a monument to the conquest of polio faithful to the facts
would consist of not one man in a white lab coat but two of them
glaring at each other. Both Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin
could and did make convincing cases for themselves and pretty
good ones against each other too. But since the public usually
prefers one hero to two, and since Salk did get there first, he
got the monument.

Between occasional shouts of "Eureka!" even the heroes of
science tend to have quiet careers. But Salk's career stands out
in at least two respects: the sheer speed with which he outraced
all the other tortoises in the field and the honors he did not
receive for doing so. How could the Man Who Saved the Children
be denied a Nobel Prize? Or summarily be turned down for
membership in the National Academy of Sciences? What was it
about Salk that so annoyed his fellow scientists?

That he was fast, there was no doubt. And hungry too. After
taking brilliant advantage of the amazing public education
available to New Yorkers in the first half of this century, this
son of Orthodox Polish-Jewish immigrants whizzed through his
medical training to fetch up at the University of Michigan an
enviable fellowship to study virology under the distinguished
Dr. Thomas Francis--who, incidentally, would remain in Salk's
corner for life, politics or no politics.

Salk's major patron at Michigan, however, proved to be no one man
but the whole U.S. Army, which needed a flu vaccine at once to
help win World War II and was happy to complete Salk's education
in speed under pressure. After that, it was a snap for him to set
up his own peacetime lab at the University of Pittsburgh and
equip it to the gills for the Great Crusade--the one that every
immunologist in the world then had his eye on--against the Great
White Whale itself, poliomyelitis.

Fortunately, Salk had somehow found time to do basic research on
the virus and write a few theoretical papers, and it was these
that caught the eye of Basil O'Connor, the zealous head of the
Infantile Paralysis Foundation, who decided to play a hunch and
shove some dimes in Salk's direction with instructions to get
going.

With that, the seeds of resentment, deep and abiding, were sown.
By then, dozens of worthy researchers had been toiling far longer
than Salk in the fields of polio and would have given their
microscopes for such funding and freedom. Who was this hired gun
who appeared from nowhere with a bankroll the size of a special
prosecutor's, plus free use of all the backbreaking work that had
gone before?

In fact, the key piece of research, available to all, was
completed a few years earlier by the one undisputed hero of this
story, Harvard's John Enders. It was his team that figured out
how to grow polio in test tubes--suddenly giving vaccine hunters
everywhere enough virus to work with.

Now the goal was truly in sight, and who got there first was
largely a matter of speed--Salk's forte--and luck. "Salk was
strictly a kitchen chemist," Sabin used to gripe. "He never had
an original idea in his life." But imaginative people perennially
underrate efficient ones, and at the time, the kitchen
chemist--who prepared his vaccine by marinating the virus in
formalin--was just what the doctor ordered.

Salk and Sabin came from the two competing schools of vaccine
research. Sabin, like Louis Pasteur, believed the way to produce
immunity was to create a mild infection with a "live" but
crippled virus, and he concocted his competing vaccine
accordingly. Salk, from his flu-fighting days, knew the immune
system could be triggered without infection, using deactivated,
or "killed," viruses. And, as it turned out, his quick-and-dirty
killed viruses were better suited to a crash program than Sabin's
carefully attenuated live ones. By 1954, Salk and Francis were
ready to launch the largest medical experiment yet carried out in
the U.S., vaccinating more than 1 million kids ages six to nine,
some with the vaccine, some with a placebo. The children weren't
told which they were getting.

The vaccine worked. But the world of science has a protocol for
releasing such findings: first publish them in a medical journal,
and then spread the credit as widely as possible. Salk took part
in a press conference and went on radio but gave credit to
nobody, including himself--of course, he was going to get the
credit anyway. And that was the mistake that would haunt him.

Radio was right; vanity was wrong. This was not some breakthrough
in carbuncle research but hot news that couldn't wait one more
minute. Within the brotherhood of researchers, however, Salk had
sinned unforgivably by not saluting either Enders or, more
seriously, his colleagues at the Pittsburgh lab. Everything he
did after that was taken as showboating--when he opened the Salk
Institute, a superlab in La Jolla, Calif., for the world's
scientists to retreat to and bask in, and even when not long
before his death in 1995, he started a search for an AIDS
vaccine, to a flourish of trumpets and welcome new funding.

Just as some politicians are at their best when running for
office, so Salk came into his own as a spokesman for vaccination.
Although it is generally accepted in the field that the real man
on the monument should be Enders (who in 1954 shared the only
Nobel Prize given for polio research), it seems unlikely that
either he or the pugnacious Sabin would have performed half so
patiently as Salk the ceremonial chores expected of monuments or
would have sat so politely through so many interviews and spread
the gospel of disease prevention quite so far and wide and
indefatigably.

And one last thing. Like the millions of American veterans who
have never ceased thanking Harry Truman for dropping the Bomb and
ending World War II, the folks who got their polio shot between
the first Salk vaccine and the Sabin model have never had any
quarrel with Salk's high place in history. (The two vaccines are
now given in alternating booster shots.) There are times when
even genius has to give way to the old Yankee virtues of know-how
and can do. And if in this instance these happened to be embodied
in the son of a couple of Polish-Jewish immigrants...well, a
lot of that kind of thing happens in America.   

Novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed wrote about his battle with
polio in In Love with Daylight (1995)


BORN Oct. 28, 1914, in East Harlem, N.Y.
1939 Graduates from New York University College of Medicine
1942 Begins work on first commercial flu vaccine
1949 Starts polio research with funding from the March of Dimes
1955 Announces success of his polio vaccine. Mass immunization
begins
1960 Founds Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla,
Calif.
1995 Dies at 70


ALBERT SABIN

His name will forever be yoked with Salk's, but Albert Sabin's
contributions to virology extend far beyond his work in polio.
Before developing his oral vaccine, the Polish-born Sabin
created vaccines against dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis.
He was studying the role of viruses in cancer when he died in
1993, at 86.


DEATH OF SMALLPOX 

Only one disease--smallpox--has been eradicated in this century.
And to the surprise of most experts, it was done without
vaccinating every last man, woman and child. The trick,
performed with minimum fuss by Dr. Donald Henderson and
colleagues at the World Health Organization, was to vigilantly
track each new outbreak and quickly vaccinate everybody in the
region, cutting the virus' chain of transmission. The last
naturally occurring case was diagnosed in 1977.


  

He shows the world how to eliminate paralytic polio, and you'd
"think he had halitosis or had committed a felony." 
BASIL O'CONNOR, National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis 

Wilfrid Sheed, TIME 100: Virologist JONAS SALK Many scientists were racing to make a polio vaccine in the '50s--but he got there first. , Time, 03-29-1999, pp 168+.

Jonas Salk