That he was fast, there was no doubt. And hungry too. After taking brilliant advantage of the amazing public education available to New Yorkers in the first half of this century, this son of Orthodox Polish-Jewish immigrants whizzed through his medical training to fetch up at the University of Michigan an enviable fellowship to study virology under the distinguished Dr. Thomas Francis — who, incidentally, would remain in Salk's corner for life, politics or no politics.

Salk's major patron at Michigan, however, proved to be no one man but the whole U.S. Army, which needed a flu vaccine at once to help win World War II and was happy to complete Salk's education in speed under pressure. After that, it was a snap for him to set up his own peacetime lab at the University of Pittsburgh and equip it to the gills for the Great Crusade — the one that every immunologist in the world then had his eye on — against the Great White Whale itself, poliomyelitis.

Fortunately, Salk had somehow found time to do basic research on the virus and write a few theoretical papers, and it was these that caught the eye of Basil O'Connor, the zealous head of the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, who decided to play a hunch and shove some dimes in Salk's direction with instructions to get going.

With that, the seeds of resentment, deep and abiding, were sown. By then, dozens of worthy researchers had been toiling far longer than Salk in the fields of polio and would have given their microscopes for such funding and freedom. Who was this hired gun who appeared from nowhere with a bankroll the size of a special prosecutor's, plus free use of all the backbreaking work that had gone before?

In fact, the key piece of research, available to all, was completed a few years earlier by the one undisputed hero of this story, Harvard's John Enders. It was his team that figured out how to grow polio in test tubes — suddenly giving vaccine hunters everywhere enough virus to work with.

Now the goal was truly in sight, and who got there first was largely a matter of speed — Salk's forte — and luck. "Salk was strictly a kitchen chemist," Sabin used to gripe. "He never had an original idea in his life." But imaginative people perennially underrate efficient ones, and at the time, the kitchen chemist — who prepared his vaccine by marinating the virus in formalin — was just what the doctor ordered.

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March 29, 1954

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