Jonas Salk Birthday Highlights
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Jonas Salk Facts
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
About Jonas Salk Jonas Edward Salk was a medical researcher and physician who developed the first successful and effective polio vaccine.Salk was appointed as the director of the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947, where he worked on a project that would find out the number of different types of polio viruses. He started with this project in 1948 and for the next seven years, he continuously worked to develop a vaccine against polio.Salk’s lab at the University of Pittsburg was small and had some restrictions, which he did not like. So, Harry Weaver, the then director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He supported Salk’s initiative and offered him additional space and equipment, along with researchers. For this, researchers like Byron Bennett, Julius Youngner, Lorraine Friedman, and L. James Lewis joined Salk’s team. After some time, Salk was able to receive grants from the Mellon family with which he built a working virology laboratory. However, later he joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, where the polio research project was started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Fear of polio and effective publicity led to an increase in funding, but research was based on dangerous live vaccines. So, Salk thought of using the safer ‘killed’ virus and not the weakened polioviruses strains. However, his contemporary, Albert Sabin, used these strains for developing an oral vaccine.Jonas Salk Net Worth, Earnings & Spending HabitsWhat was Jonas Salk’s net worth?Jonas Salk has a net worth of $ 3 million at the time of his death.How much did Jonas Salk earn per year?The exact figures of Salk’s earnings are not available to the media.Height, Age & Physical AttributesHow tall was Jonas Salk?The height of Jonas Salk is not known.How old was Jonas Salk?Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914, in New York City, and he passed away on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla in California. At the time of his death, he was aged 80. He rests at El Camino Memorial Park, San Diego, California.Childhood And EducationJonas Salk was born to Daniel Salk and Dora (née Press) Salk. Both his parents were Jewish and neither of them had received much formal education. Salk had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee (who grew up to be a renowned child psychologist).Salk did his schooling at Townsend Harris High School. For his undergraduate, he enrolled in the City College of New York, from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. As a child, he was never interested in biology or anatomy, but he liked everything human and tended to the human side of things.After this, he started studying at New York University Medical School. Here, he was engrossed in research and did not want to study medicine, and also took a year off to study biochemistry. Motivated by the idea of helping humankind and not only individual patients, he focused on bacteriology. So, in the last year of his studies, he dealt with influenza. So, he wanted to explore if there was potential to destroy the infection spread by the virus and still immunize. Then, through various experiments, he and the group he was working with, concluded that it was quite possible.During his postgraduate in virology, his most effective learning period was working at the University of Michigan in the Thomas Francis laboratory, where he studied flu viruses and vaccine development. Before this, he worked at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had worked on discovering the type B influenza virus. He also worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis to develop an influenza vaccine. So, the duo worked on pinpointing and isolating an influenza strain that was used to make an effective vaccine.Family, Romance, And RelationshipsWho was Jonas Salk’s partner?Salk met his first wife, Donna Lindsay, at NYU, and they got married in 1939. They had three children, Peter, Darrell, and Jonathan. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1968.In 1970, Salk married French artist Françoise Gilot, who is a former mistress of Pablo Picasso. They were married until Salk died from heart failure in 1995.Career And Professional HighlightsBest Known For…Jonas Salk is best known for developing the first successful polio vaccine.In 1952, Salk injected 43 children with his polio vaccine, after it was successfully tested on lab rats. This event took place at D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, which is now the Watson Institute. Soon, he went on to inject other children, including his own. By 1954, the vaccine was tested on over a million children, who came to be known as the polio pioneers. In the same year, while working as the director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Salk manufactured a vaccine using ‘killed’ polio cells and not a live virus - called the Salk vaccine. He did this because he thought the killed virus samples were equally effective as immunizing a patient with a live virus, but with a lesser risk of the patient getting infected, although other researchers thought effective vaccines could only be developed with live viruses. He developed this killed virus vaccine by growing virus samples and then deactivating them by adding formaldehyde. Upon injecting these strains into the bloodstream, the vaccine prompted the immune system to manufacture protective antibodies without introducing a weakened alternative of the virus into patients. Finally, in 1955, the vaccine was announced safe.This massive project had millions of contributors and volunteers. In fact, the institute got into debt to fund the research involving the development of the Salk vaccine, which required him to work for two-and-a-half years. The vaccine developed by Salk - the inactivated vaccine - came into public use in 1955 and is listed on WHO’s List of Essential Medicines.Because of his noble work, Salk was hailed as a miracle worker and he earned a special place in medical history. He chose not to patent the vaccine or go for profitable returns (although the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh wanted to get it patented) because he wanted the vaccine to be globally distributed. Soon, several countries hurried to get the children vaccinated. Some countries like Sweden, Canada, Denmark, West Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, even started polio immunization campaigns using Salk’s vaccine. By the end of the decade, the Salk vaccine was available in about 90 countries. Then, in 1961, Albert Sabin’s attenuated live oral polio vaccine (OPV), also known as the Sabin vaccine, came into commercial use. It took less than 25 years after the development of Salk’s vaccine to completely eliminate domestic transmission of polio in the United States.Although his work was life-changing, Salk did not get a membership in the American Academy of Sciences nor was he ever awarded a Nobel. It was because he did not respect the work of the scientists who preceded him and he also trivialized the efforts put in by his team.After taking the world by storm, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, in 1963. This institute is a center for scientific and medical research. Here, he served as the director until 1975, after which he assumed the title of the founding director. He, along with other scientists, focused on developing cures for diseases like multiple sclerosis and cancer. Salk even went on to explore AIDS and HIV in the later years. Besides research, Salk also invested his time in writing books on philosophical topics, like Man Unfolding, Survival of the Wisest, World Population, and Human Values: A New Reality, and Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason. Another activity that Salk partook in was campaigning for mandatory vaccination, which he believed to be a moral commitment.Today, Salk’s papers can be found in the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.What awards did Jonas Salk win?Salk has received several awards throughout his lifetime. The most notable ones would be the Alber Lasker Award, Mellon Institute Award, Robert Koch Medal, Congressional Gold Medal, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award.Other Interesting Jonas Salk Facts And TriviaDr. Francis Crick, who is one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix, was a founding faculty at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.Main image credit: spatuletail / Shutterstock.com
Jonas Salk Birthday Highlights
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Jonas Salk Facts
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
Jonas Edward Salk was a medical researcher and physician who developed the first successful and effective polio vaccine.
Jonas Salk Birthday Highlights
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Jonas Salk Birthday Highlights
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Birth Name Jonas Salk
Place Of Birth New York , USA Age 109 years old
Birth Date October 27 1914
Jonas Salk Facts
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
Jonas Salk Facts
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
Child Star? no Occupation Virologist, Medical Researcher Education & Qualifications New York University Net Worth $3,000,000
Current Partner Françoise Gilot Children Peter, Darrell, Jonathan Parents Daniel Salk, Dora (née Press) Salk Siblings Herman Salk, Lee Salk
