Jonas Salk

Jonas Edward Salk (English: Jonas Edward Salk, October 28, 1914 - June 23, 1995) was an American Jewish experimental medicine scientist and virologist. He is mainly famous for developing the world's first safe and effective "polio vaccine". In 1963, he founded the Salk Institute in California, United States, which focuses on life science research. Salk graduated from the City College of New York and New York University, and later engaged in postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan. In 1947, Salk became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he conducted research on poliovirus and successfully developed the first polio vaccine a few years later. During the research and development process, Salk successfully conducted preliminary human trials on himself, his family, and other volunteers. In 1954, a large-scale vaccination trial of millions of children (6-9 years old) was carried out across the United States. In April 1955, the trial proved that the vaccine was safe and effective. In order to make the vaccine more widely available for vaccination, Salk never patented the vaccine or profited from it. In 1959, about 90 countries around the world adopted Salk's polio vaccine. Before the invention of this vaccine, poliomyelitis (poliomyelitis) was one of the diseases that posed the greatest threat to public health in the United States after World War II. On average, more than 45,000 people in the United States were infected every year. By 1962, the number of infections dropped to 910, and the disease was completely eliminated in 1979.