Dr. Jonas Salk
Portrayed
by Amanda O.
February
2000
In 1955 polio was a disease all parents feared their
children would get. If children got polio they either died or were
paralyzed for life. Each spring there was a polio epidemic that affected
most people.
I’m Jonas Salk. I found a vaccination
for this disease. I was born in New York on October 28,1914.
I was the oldest out of three boys in my family. As a child I wasn’t
at all interested in science. In my family I was the first to go
to college. I went to college to be a lawyer. I took a science
class just for something different. I found that I liked science.
Then I decided to study medicine. In college I was invited by a scientist
to study influenza. The scientist and I found a vaccination for it.
After I got out of college I made my own lab
in the basement of a hospital. In my lab I had some people who helped
me find clues towards finding a vaccination for polio. I figured
out that there are three types of polio; type A, type B, and type C.
In each type there are strains (different kinds in that type). My
vaccination would have to fight all three types. If it only fought
type A and B you could still catch it. I decided it was best to have
a killed vaccine. It would create antibodies but wouldn’t make people
get the disease. Antibodies fight off the disease. In most
shots there is a little bit of the disease in it so your body can create
antibodies to fight off the disease if you actually get it.
While making the vaccine and experimenting
with it there was some competition between Albert Sabins’s vaccine and
my vaccine. At meetings he said that my vaccine wouldn’t work.
He was creating a live vaccine. Secretly I thought that his wouldn’t
work. If he has a live vaccine you’re most likely to get polio because
it’s alive and likely to spread.
When I got to where I thought my vaccine was
good enough to try I tried it on my family while they were sleeping.
I found it okay and it was ready to go to field trials.
In the field trials we tested it on whoever came. We found
out a year later that it had worked. A friend of mine told on TV
that there was finally a vaccine to prevent polio. Immediately
people started calling it the “Salk vaccine”. I didn’t like it because
I wasn’t the only one who made it.
Later on I was nominated for the Global Peace
Award but didn’t get it.
The vaccine was being made right away in factories. Then
all of the sudden there were reports that people had gotten polio from
my vaccine. I thought that it wasn’t working because the government
made me put a germ killer in it and it wouldn’t protect type C. Inspectors
went and checked out all the factories and found that one of the factories
wasn’t killing the vaccine.
Soon after, Albert Sabin, who didn’t think
my vaccine would work, came out with one. It soon became more popular
than mine did because it was an oral vaccine. It was put into little
sugar cubes and was easy to take. It could be passed out while mine
had to set up in clinics. In the war it was hard to set up clinics
and Sabin’s was extremely popular there. But his vaccine didn’t always
work.
After the publicity died down I got divorced.
I soon married another woman, Francoise Gilot. I began to write and
wrote four books. Later I founded the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological
Studies. There I could study and try to find cures for AIDS and Cancer.
I died on June 23,1995 before I could find a cure for them.
Thanks to me a lot of peoples’ lives were saved.
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