Jonas Salk, developing a killed-virus vaccine against polio at the University of Pittsburgh, took the unusual step of inoculating his own wife and children before the vaccine underwent mass testing. His confidence, rooted in years of laboratory work, reflected the urgency of a disease that paralyzed tens of thousands of American children annually and had made polio one of the most feared illnesses of the postwar era.
By 1953, polio epidemics were terrorizing American summers, filling hospital wards with paralyzed children and iron lungs humming in rows. Jonas Salk, a virologist who had spent years growing poliovirus in monkey kidney cells and inactivating it with formaldehyde, believed he had produced a vaccine safe enough to protect without infecting.
Before subjecting the wider public to his creation, Salk tested it closest to home: on May 26, 1953, he injected his wife Donna and their three young sons, Peter, Darrell, and Jonathan, at their kitchen table. It was an act of scientific conviction and personal risk that colleagues found both admirable and unnerving, given how little was still known about long-term safety.
The gamble paid off. No one in the Salk household developed adverse reactions, and the following year the vaccine underwent the largest medical experiment in American history, testing over 1.8 million children nationwide. When results were announced in April 1955, church bells rang and factories paused; polio cases in the United States would fall by over 90 percent within a few years, and Salk became one of the most celebrated scientists of the twentieth century.
Key people: Jonas Salk, Donna Salk