Jonas SalkBorn 28 Oct 1914; died 23 Jun 1995 at age 80. American Jewish physician and medical researcher, born in New York City, who developed the first safe and effective vaccine for poliomyelitis. His early work (1946) was research on the influenza virus. In 1963, he became director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at the Univ. of California, San Diego. He developed a vaccine against poliomyelitis by cultivating three strains of the virus separately in monkey tissue. The virus was separated from the tissue, stored for a week, killed with formaldehyde, then tested to make certain that it is dead. A series of three or four injections with the killed virus vaccine was required to confer immunity. |
