The scientist who developed the polio vaccine

Although less than 1% of infections led to paralysis, the sheer scale of polio outbreaks meant that large numbers of children still ended up with iron lungs. They may remain covered from the neck down for days, months, or even years. The patients Zogran cared for were still infectious, and she and her fellow nurses were told their only protection was strict hand washing. “We would wash our hands every time we touched one or more patients, and I can remember coming home at night and my hands were very sore and cracked,” she said.

Although children are primarily affected by polio, no one is safe. Future US President Franklin Roosevelt, then a rising political star, contracted the virus in 1921 at the age of 39. This virus left him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. In office, he made the fight against polio his own personal campaign, and in 1938, he founded the March of Dimes, a polio charity that would turn the traditional model of fundraising on its head. Instead of seeking large donations from a few, it sought small donations from many, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

By the late 1940s, scientists had proven that polio entered the bloodstream through the intestines. Meanwhile, two researchers have emerged to compete in the race for the vaccine, each taking a very different path. Dr. Albert Sabin, a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati College of Medicine, had spent two decades studying the polio virus and believed in moving slowly and carefully, according to David M. Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story. “He saw himself as a scientist-scientist… He worked in the laboratory, never left it, making discoveries one by one, using the building blocks,” he said in a 2014 BBC documentary.

Meanwhile, Salk was a fast-moving researcher at the Pittsburgh Medical School who had already produced a successful influenza vaccine for troops during World War II. More importantly, he had the support of the March of Dimes, which was impatient for progress. Dr. Paul Offit of the Vaccine Education Center in Philadelphia told the BBC how Salk worked with the speed and focus of a pharmaceutical company, an approach that challenges conventional ideas about how scientists behave. “Salk and Sabin had fundamental differences about what was the best vaccine. Salk thought it would be a virus that would be completely killed. Sabin thought it would be a virus that would be weakened,” he said.