Dr. Jonas Salk

It's the birthday of the man who developed the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, born in New York City (1914) who developed a polio vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid 1950s, when parents were so worried about their children that they kept them home from swimming pools in the summer. Salk's discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus, and he tested the vaccine on himself, his family, and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe. The vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, the number of people infected by polio went down from more than 10,000 a year to less than 100. Salk was declared a national hero. - The Writer's Almanac