This Day in Medical History (Salk Starts Last Phase of Polio-Vaccine Program)

February 23, 1954 – As part of the third and most important pilot program of his major medical discovery, at Arsenal School in the working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville, Dr. Jonas E. Salk (pictured) immunized 137 five-to-nine-year-old schoolchildren with his new polio vaccine. The school was the first to participate in the city-wide experiment that within a month would inoculate 7,000 children.

The vaccine came not a month too soon: the summer of 1952 produced the worst polio epidemic in U.S. history, with 57,628 coming down with the disease. On the same day that Salk tried his vaccine out on the Arsenal students, The New York Times reported on a scientific panel’s conclusion that mass inoculations with gamma globulin of 185,000 children in 23 areas the prior summer had failed to produce demonstrably beneficial results against polio.

Salk developed his vaccine while working at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. In his laboratories on the ground floor and in the basement, he used rhesus monkeys. According to Franklin Toker’s Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait (1986), the walls “were said to bear the paw prints of animals that had scampered out of their cages.” (The building—the former Municipal Hospital—is now named in Salk’s honor.)

On April 12, 1955—ten years to the day after the death of the world’s most famous polio victim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt—Salk announced the successful conclusion of this medical experiment.

Though not well known nowadays, a major force behind Salk’s pioneering work was Basil O’Connor, FDR’s law partner. Establishing the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis at his old partner’s request, O’Connor spearheaded the March of Dimes fundraising campaign that brought in $50 million a year ($250 million in 1995 dollars) by the late 1940s.

Intent on moving beyond supplying iron lungs, O’Connor saw killed-virus vaccines as an alternative to live vaccines, which had given researchers unexpected problems. He persuaded Salk to come to the University of Pittsburgh with the promise of a professorship.

O’Connor may have performed his greatest bit of service for Salk, however, in a case of medical politics. Twice, Salk saw his applications for funding for the killed-virus vaccine rejected by the scientific advisory committee of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. On Salk’s third try, the committee told O’Connor that it would not stand in the way of the doctor’s grant.

By 1960, Salk’s vaccine had all but eliminated polio from the general population.

When O’Connor died in 1972, Salk paid tribute to his old benefactor at a memorial service: “In 80 years, what centuries could not do, he did…He used time well and time did not misuse him. Hence, miracles were wrought. His accomplishments are woven into the fabric of existence. He made history happen.”