Forty years after he announced his discovery of the first successful polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk returned to the University of Michigan to be honored for his triumph over the once dreaded disease.
The university and the March of Dimes, which paid the $1.7 million cost of Salk's polio research, honored the researcher today at the Rackham Auditorium on the Ann Arbor campus. It was there, in 1955, that Salk announced a successful trial of the vaccine.Polio struck 57,600 Americans in 1952, killing thousands and leaving many others paralyzed. Fearful parents once kept their children indoors to avoid exposure to the virus.
In 1953, Salk announced the development of a vaccine that used killed viruses to stimulate people's immune systems. He, his wife and three sons received an injection of the vaccine, as did 1.8 million schoolchildren in a 1954 trial of the drug.
On April 12, 1955, Salk announced that the trial found the vaccine to be safe and effective. Health officials quickly began inoculating millions of people, and the threat faded.
"What had the most profound effect was the freedom from fear," the 80-year-old Salk said Tuesday in a telephone conference call from Ann Arbor.
A rival, Dr. Albert Sabin, later developed an oral vaccine that used weakened, rather than killed, viruses. Beginning with its introduction in 1961, the oral vaccine quickly eclipsed Salk's formula.
Congress honored Salk with a gold medal for "great achievement in the field of medicine."
The March of Dimes announced today that it was creating an annual $100,000 prize to be presented in Salk's name to an investigator who makes major advances in developmental biology.
"This prize honors the extraordinary contribution made by Dr. Jonas Salk to the health of children and adults here in the United States and around the world," March of Dimes President Dr. Jennifer Howse said in a statement. "Millions of people were saved from paralysis or death."
Salk went on to found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., in 1963. His research on prevention of viral diseases continued after he stepped down as institute director in 1975. In 1986, he began AIDS research.
"It's a more complex problem, it's a different kind of threat," he said. "Polio cripples limbs, and the AIDS virus cripples the immune system, thus rendering people susceptible to all kinds of infections."
In the late 1980s, Salk announced some positive results with a vaccine designed to slow the development of AIDS in those already infected with the HIV virus.
Researchers are "on the threshold of large-scale studies" of the vaccine, Salk said.
Salk said he is optimistic scientists will crack the secrets of AIDS and other diseases caused by microorganisms.
"My own view is we will overcome. We will have enough ingenuity to overcome these threats of nature," he said.
"I am a perennial optimist," he said. "We certainly have the knowledge. The question is whether we have the wisdom."