During the past century, we have increased our lifespan by 30 years.

Most of that increase is due to vaccines.

Before vaccines, pertussis or whooping cough routinely killed 8000 people a year, mostly children.

Rubella or German measles, would cause birth defects in as man as 20,000 children every year.

Measles would commonly cause between 500 and 2000 to die every year.

Diphtheria was was the most common killer of teenagers.

All this before vaccines.

But I think you could argue that no vaccine captured.

I think the emotions, certainly of the American public as much as the polio vaccine did.

I mean, you know, you looked at these children walking down the stree as if they had had gone to war.

I mean, as it was if they were veterans of a foreign war and it was young children, I think it was a just a very, very emotional disease for this country.

Doctor, so before I hand you at this citation, I have no words in which adequatel to express the thanks of myself.

All the people I know and all 164 million Americans to say nothing of al the other people in the world.

A little profit for your disbelief.

I am very, very happy to earn that.

when we look back upon polio today, you look back upo what was really a summer plague.

It came every year.

It came like locusts.

And newspaper would have almost baseball box scores of the numbers of kids who would come down.

And in that week that would start around late May and go up in June and higher in July and spike in August.

And then by Labor Day the summer plague would be over.

It would hit this kid and not this kid, and nobody knew why it would descend on Denver, but not on San Francisco.

And no one knew why.

All you knew was that every summer, thousands of very unlucky kids would come down with this insidious disease that usually left the incapacitated and often killed.

And people had all kinds of theories about it.

You shouldn' take your kids to a public pool.

Nobody should give birthday parties.

I mean, it was like a phantom enemy.

This illness.

And I was scared to death as a young mother.

Polio would spread silently and then pick out its victi and continue to spread silently.

Take out another victim.

What was known by then that it was a virus disease, but there was no way to treat it, and there wasn't really sure how it was transmitted.

People weren't sure.

One of the great ironies of polio is that it appears to be a disease of cleanliness.

It begins in the United States in epidemic form, early in the 20th century at the very time we are becoming increasingly antiseptic, ger phobic advertising is telling us that germs are very, very deadly, that we don't see them, but they are killers.

And the more cleanliness becomes kind of a way of life in the United States the less likely young kids are to have immune system that fight off disease easily.

There was a tremendous amount of myth and misinformation that surrounded the disease.

People thought that the disease was spread by cats.

They thought it was spread by fleas.

They thought that it was it was spread by organ grinder's monkeys.

They thought that it was spread by bananas that had been imported from South America.

They thought that it could be cured by oxbloo or sassafras or wood shavings.

There were just all kinds of mess.

Every day when I went out to play, my grandmother would take a cloth ba with a piece of solid camphor, which is a they used to use it for more sports, and she would put this little bag on a string and put it around my neck and send me out to play.

And she was sure till she died that that she had kept me from getting polio.

My mother at that time would actually not let me play with new kids.

The logic being that I ha the germs of my older friends, and there was no reason for me to get near new kids because they may spread the polio germs, and it was really that kind of fear that was fel by every parent in this country.

There was no prevention.

There was no cure.

There was no protection.

You could be a good parent, a bad parent, an indifferent parent, and you still had no way of protecting your child against polio.

Polio is transmitted from person to person.

A child with polio infection comes in contact with another child and transmits that infection.

The virus reproduce in the mouse, reproduces in the intestine, gets into the bloo and invades the nervous system.

And what it does is it kills a particular cell in the nervous syste called the anterior horn cell, and this cell tells the muscles what to do.

It's like cutting the wires to a light bulb.

The light goes off.

Well, I had a bad headache and went to the doctor the next day, and the following day I collapsed and they figured I had polio and sent me off to Municipal Hospital.

I got polio and I was 21 months old back in 1952.

Our house was immediately quarantined.

A lot of people from the health departmen came to the house, to interview my parents to find ou where we've been, what we did, try to find out where we may have contracted the disease and everything and meanwhile, we were all sent to Municipal Hospital.

Started showing signs of paralysis.

And at tha time, you got in an iron lung.

That was what happened when you went ther and you had breathing problems.

And I was in an iron lung for approximately 11 days.

But they couldn't swallow and get all the secretions in their throat and down into their lungs and then they couldn't breathe.

That was a deadly combination.

And so they put them in an iron lung with to give positive and negative pressure to expand the chest so that they could breathe, that would like, cool air into the ches and push air out of the chest.

That was a nightmare.

It was a total nightmare.

Both of the patients and for the doctors, we would get these children coming up and they would be screaming and the anxiety level was unbelievable.

You try to comfort them.

And how do you comfort a 4 or 5 year old?

He didn't even have his teddy bear.

He could take nothing with him.

And I remember the face on some of these kids, you know, in agony.

Just picture, two year old, you know, can't breathe.

It's just dreadful Danny was probably.

one of my most favorite patient, he was a little five year old and he had bulbar polio, so he was in a respirator.

I would tell Danny jokes.

Yeah, little jokes or read him stories and everything.

And it was a beautiful relationship.

So I came on duty.

I picked up my clipboard and I looked down, and I don't see Danny's name.

And I said to someone, I said, why don't I have Danny today?

It was just the loudest silence I ever heard in my life.

So I dropped my clipboard and I ran.

I'm sorry.

And I ran down to his respirator and it was empty.

Polio.

No treatment.

You just try to keep them aliv with, artificial breathing and, physical therapy and then try to equip them with some kind of gear that would help them walk again if you managed to save their lives.

Really When you talk about polio or infantile paralysis, you you must, in th United States, begin with FDR, with President Roosevelt.

He got it at the age of 39.

In 1921 and spent the rest of his life really trying to find the cure and the prevention.

He never found a cure.

He died in 1945, still having polio.

But Roosevelt di was to put together a voluntary organization that was absolutely extraordinary.

In the past.

Philanthropies are a few millionaires giving money and throwing it at some project with the March of Dimes.

It was to turn this on its head.

Each year his birthday wa celebrated with mammoth parties in behalf of the March of Dimes.

Back when it started.

It was called the Mothers March.

And its goal was to collect money, to do research, to conquer children's disease and polio is its primary target.

The name was then changed to the March of Dimes because, a dime was the currency of the time.

That was a meaningful contribution from a child by polio tonight.

That's the marching mothers.

So you you're waiting for them.

I remember, going out with my mother, on the mothers march, and you would go around the neighborhood, and if the light were on, on the front porch, then I would go to the house and collect a little cardboard thing that I had inserts for coins to go in, and we would gather those and ship those literally to the white House.

There are a lot of parents whose children are health and happy now who live in fear.

I know I do the fear, my friends, this polio.

What made the March of Dimes such an extraordinary organization was that, fo one thing, they used the latest techniques in advertising and public relations.

They got celebrities like Mickey Rooney and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

And, I mean, I have a picture in my book of a very uncomfortable Richard Nixon pumping gas for polio.

They interrupted the, the serials and the Motion Picture House.

We will now have a collection of March of Dimes, and I could not see the movie upon the quarters and dimes of dollars that you give.

Now, in this theater depends the happiness of some child somewhere tomorrow.

They also use poster children, you know.

Give me your money and help me walk.

And it was dime by dime by dime.

Everyone would give whatever he or she could.

It would be a crusade involving tens of thousands of people, and you would really make it into a national crusade.

These were Americans pulling together, and they were pulling together to some degree, because this was a children's disease and having a visual disease where you saw leg braces and you saw crutches and you saw iron lungs, was something that was simply intolerable to the American conscience and the united as a people to do away with that.

I like it.

I grew up in a family where there was a sense you know, my dad was a scientist and that he did science and he actually would talk about how he used to really as a child, pray that he could do something good for humanity.

He chose research.

And he said this throughout his life.

I chose to do research because I asked myself, what can I do that's going to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people?

Jonas Salk is brought to the University of Pittsburgh from Michigan, not to work on polio, but to work on influenza.

And what Salk understand very early on is that, you know, you sort of go where the money is.

And the money was coming from the National Foundation with very, very large grants for polio.

My father had an opportunit to participate in the complete drudgery of the polio virus typing program.

And that's something that no budding scientist at the beginning of his or her career would want to take on.

But this was an entree.

Here was a place he could get started.

I mean, the good news was tha there was a philanthropic base that was going to support him here.

The bad news was it was Pittsburgh, which at the time was in a backwater of science.

Jonas Sal was enormously well organized.

He was very hard working, and he basically could run a laboratory much as one would run a laboratory in industry.

He had a lot of people that worked for him, and he was very good at being able to do difficult and arguably boring tasks quickly and well.

And so one of his original task was to try and determine how many different types of polio viruses there were, because if there were many types, then all of them would need to be included in a vaccine.

In order to to do anything towards a vaccine, one had to make sure that there were only three types of polio.

There knew that that there were three types, but what if there were more?

It was essential.

I mean, prior vaccines may have failed because they didn't have a representative of the three types.

So it requires an intense effort to collect meaningful information.

Then you can analyze i and then get meaningful results.

Doctor Salk and his research team were in the basement.

They were looking for the live polio virus and so when a patient has to have a bowel movement, we would cover the bedpan with a sterile towel and run to the door.

And sitting out in the hal on wooden benches would be Pit medical students, kinda cute too.

and that was their primary job was to grab that bedpan and have it down in the lab, probably within a minute or two.

And that's where Doctor Salk isolated the live polio virus from a young mal patient at Municipal Hospital.

This was the job that prominent researchers, prominent virologists, would not do.

This was the job that an Albert Sabin would give to a graduate student.

It was scut work.

It was hard work.

It was uninteresting work.

But what Jonas Salk intuitively understood was that it was the kind of work that would get him on the March of Dimes bandwagon.

He was the miracle worker in the white coat on the one hand.

But he was also an incredibl hard working, devoted scientist for whom people were willing to sacrifice.

And Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh put together an extraordinary team of researchers.

And what Salk did was sort of direct this team and whip this team and move it in a single direction.

And that direction was to put out a killed virus, polio vaccine as quickly as possible.

He very much inspired a level of loyalty and devotion in people.

People had a sense that the were doing something of value, that there was a higher purpose to what they were doing, and that was a tremendously powerful thing.

But when he was tracking down something, when something neede to be done, it had to be done.

And he really did not tolerate delays very well.

He had recruite two professionals who were here, Byron Bennett and Jim Lewis, who were already here, Jim Lewis that was doing all the monkey, most of the monkey work.

And Byron Bennet was in charge of the mouse work and the preparation of all the samples that came from the monkeys.

We had our own animal colonies on the second floor.

We had rhesus monkeys and the later on to cynomolgus monkeys.

And by the way, we made al of our own food for the monkeys.

That food was made in our basement, and vitamins and supplements that we purchased when we were on the night shifts.

We knew exactly when we had one hour to go.

The monkeys would wake up at 6 a.m.

and they would grab their food pans, and they would claim against the bias of their progress, what a racket.

And we would look at each other and smile and say, we have one hour to go, you know?

So we called it Monkey Time.

Elsie Ward did the tissue culture work and she was superb at it.

She could get cultures to live and transfer that other people couldn't.

And she was really one of these peopl that she kind of talked to them.

She had this relationship with her tissue cultures that that nobody else did.

She was like a gardener.

The cells they were personalities to her.

They were like flowers.

She cultivated them.

She nursed them.

She took care of them.

You know, Elsie had the special touch.

Jonas Salk and his team had to figure out a way to take three types of polio virus and to kill it with formaldehyde, but to kill it in such a wa that it could still be juiced up to trick your immune system into producing antibodies.

What he showe was that if he took polio virus and an infectious, live, dangerous polio virus at, say, a million infectious particles per teaspoon, that he coul then treat it with formaldehyde at a certain temperature, at a certain level of acidity and a certain concentration of formaldehyde, and that he could reproducibl over, say, three days go from a million infectious particles to one infectious particle.

So he would have a million fold reduction over a period of three days.

He then reasoned that if he continued to do that, he would have another million fold reduction over the next three days and another million fold reduction over the next three days, so that, for all intents and purposes, he had completely inactivated the virus.

Now, you had to have faith in this because becaus although you could test to see whether there wa a thousand infectious particles per dose or one infectious particle windows, you can't really test to see whether there's one infectious particle in a million doses, because you're not going to test a million doses.

He wa challenging medical orthodoxy.

All of the ordained ministers of virology said, you have to have a live virus in the vaccine to stop polio.

And this Jonas kept saying no, I think we can fake the body into manufacturing these protective antibodie by giving them killed vaccine.

Don't have to have the worry about it.

A tame virus going wild again.

He loved the idea.

It's like, God, if you can prevent people from getting a disease withou putting them at risk, why not?

And it was, you know, there was a certain sort of humane spirit to it.

Salk suffered.

What were two experiences that occurred in the 1930s?

One was made by an NY researcher named Maurice Brody, who who took brains of monkey that were infected with polio, ground them up and treated it with with formaldehyde.

By doing i that way, there were many polio virus particles which sort of hit in that brain tissue, and therefore he really gave children a live fully virulent polio virus as a vaccine, which obviously had a tragic result.

There was another researcher named John Carver, who worked at at Philadelphia General Hospital, who believed that you could take polio virus and weaken it with an agent called rice and foliate, which is to derive from the castor being plant.

That, too was a horribly flawed concept, and it resulted in a horribly flawed vaccine.

The two caused polio in some children.

So this was the mid 1930s, and I think it cast a pall over polio research for a solid 20 years.

And because you knew that in the mid 1930s, there were researchers that gave a polio vaccine that caused polio.

He was well aware of the early vaccine failures.

The first attempt with an inactivated polio vaccine killed kids.

So the way was clear what not to do.

In a sense, Jonas was the one who fought all those outside battles.

He fought the immunization committee that was almost unanimously opposed to a kill vaccine, with Sabin leading the charge.

Alber Sabin was the vaccine orthodoxy.

I mean, he had bought into the notion that the only way to make a polio vaccine, or frankly, any vaccine, was to take a virus and weaken it.

And I think he Pooh poohed Salk because he felt that Salk's notion of taking a polio virus and completely inactivating with formaldehyde as a way to make a lifelong vaccine was ridiculous.

The problem, however, was that Sabin had an enormous amount of influence, and partly because he was very good at inserting himself among those who shared his belief, which were the big virologists at the time.

There were several concerns about the killed vaccine.

One is, would it induce long term lifelong immunity?

Obviously, when you start wit a vaccine, you don't know that.

Secondly, the concern was that with killed vaccine, you still could have virus multiplying in the people getting infected but not sick, and therefore spreading it all over.

Vaccines, with the exception of tetanus, work two ways.

One is individual protection, which is of course not 100%, and then the other is what's called herd immunity.

If you vaccinate enough people, you protect those who can't be vaccinated for one reason or another, or and you also protect the people where the vaccine would fail.

What Salk understands very early on was that he was really running against the tide.

All of the people who mattered in virology John Enders, Albert Sabin, Tom rivers and others basically believed in a live virus vaccine.

And here is Jonas Salk, someone who was younger, going i exactly the opposite direction.

And what you have are very very confident, very ambitious, very competitive scientists in a kind of frantic race.

Although they deny they're in race, they are fully in a race.

Doctor Sabin came to the lab once, and he sort of looked over my shoulder at what I think I was cutting tissue at that point, and he said, you won't be doing that next month.

So he was very negative.

Let's say my father was really quite sensitive to not being understood, not being accepted and to being attacked.

I mean, he wasn't a person who attacked other people because he saw things differently.

I think there was always degree of loneliness that that, that he dealt with both collegiately and to some extent interpersonally.

Sabin and that committe scared the hell out of people.

And they from the beginning never thought it would work.

And it was only one man could overrule them.

Basil O'Connor.

Basil O'Connor had complete and total confidence in what we were doing.

The one man now who isn't even a scientist or an MD, was really making the decisions for our work to continue to go on.

Basil Connor was the hea and started the March of Dimes.

You know, O'Connor was a close friend, a law associate of FDR.

He always had a white carnation in his lapel.

He was, you know, I don't think he wore spats, but in my mind, he did.

And my dad learned a tremendous amount from O'Connor about how to get things don in the world, about how boards run, how to get thing politically through my father.

He had an uncanny ability to sidestep questions, to sidestep challenges.

His way, in a sense, was not to try and boil over the opposition.

He would find ways around it.

My sort of.

You know, filial and also I suppose, somewhat psychiatric take on this is my father' mother was an incredibly strong and influential woman in their lives in very, very complex ways.

The three boys all referre to their mother as the Duchess.

She was a very well willful pers and you couldn't disagree with her directly.

Just as an example, my father had to learn how to eat successfully, which meant that he couldn't finish everything on his plate because if he finished everything on his plate, a whole new plateful would appear.

So this was the sort of tricks he had learned how how to survive in face of a mother who was extremely controlling and and domineering.

This actually left hi with a strategy that served him very well in getting things done and pushing things through committees.

It would drive associates crazy because there was a problem to it, but it was very effective.

The stakes couldn't be higher every day that it took to make that vaccine, even better was a day that some children around the United States got polio, and Jonas Salk is working on a vaccine that may not be the be all and end all the vaccines, but the point is that he ca produce a vaccine that is safe and he can produce it quickly.

And kids are dying every year.

And as Basil O'Connor head of the National Foundation, says, this is a scientis who sees beyond the microscope.

My father has been criticized, for not being interested in science for its own sak and making esoteric discoveries.

And I think that's absolutely true.

I don't think he cared at all about anything esoteric, but he cared a lot about how do you use science?

How do you use the principles of science, how to use the methodology of science to solve problems like all excellent scientists, he was an iconoclast.

He didn't believe the orthodoxy.

I mean, and that's wha scientists have to do, really.

They have to lock themselves in a roo and come up with something new.

That's how they get grants.

That's how they get papers, and that's how they make major public health accomplishments.

I mean, you know, scientists really in many ways want to answer a question which asks ten more.

This enables them to continue to get research money, continued to to write papers.

Salk was not that person.

Salk wanted to get from point A to point B, and point B was making a vaccine.

He was using science as a means to an end.

Once he understood it and saw that it was right, he figured, well, that was good enough.

Everybody else would understand it.

He used to tell a story o when he was in medical school, somebody saying to him, damn it, Salk, can't you just do i the way everybody else does it?

And he couldn't.

It's like he did.

He couldn't.

We didn't have to, really be stimulated very much by what was going on around us, because up on the third floor was the polio ward, wher they had all the air and lungs.

All you had to do was go and look in there and you didn't need much more incentive.

That's a very sobering experience.

You know, just just to have walked through all those iron lungs and the rocking beds.

I think we're almost as impressive, because to think that you just don't stop doing this all day, you know, it was very sobering.

So he saw what was needed.

He was aware of the suffering that was taking place.

He was aware of the fear he just had to get this done.

He did not mak people think that it's tomorrow.

And he kept saying, we have t find out how many doses to give, how far apart.

There's a long road here yet.

But everybody was pushing.

We'll see.

We'll get it done faster.

After a while it became seven days a week, where we became convinced that we were on the verge of being able to solve this problem.

From the monkey data.

Just from the monkey data.

This was high, high Exciting.

I mean, it was kind of took you over, Jonas said to me at one time he felt like he was riding a horse and being whipped all the time because it.

O'Connor wanted to get it done.

Get it done.

Jonas' are we talking about a vaccine?

I don't even know if we have a vaccine.

I'm talking about an experimental preparation.

O'Connor says Jonas, you have a vaccine.

Know we got to use it.

There's no sense of saying it's five years away or ten years away.

Let's get moving and have it sooner rather than later.

It was amazing, even to us, how rapidly things were going and how positive everything was turning out.

We were on a run, that was unbelievable and would couldn't be duplicated today.

We never could have worked the way we did.

The lab would have not passed inspection.

We would have had to have much more, elaborate, elaborate setup.

Our lab conditions were rather primitive.

We worked on open lab benches and on the lab benches.

We put down towels which were soaked in mercury chloride.

So in case anything would drop on to the the heavy metal and the mercury would destroy the virus.

We didn't have laminar flow hoods.

We didn't wear masks, we didn't wear gloves.

There was no plastic.

Nothing was disposable.

The real volume was in what we call the kitchen, where all these test tubes had to be cleaned and sterilized.

And I mean, it got to be.

The kitchen finally went to the basement and they had these huge centrifuges and all kinds of staff down there.

We made a lot of our own equipment, even though they made specia types of pipettes to use nothing more than a rubber tubin with a, filter on the end of it that you could put in your mouth and suck the top up in the pipettes, and you suck up on it.

And then the fluid comes up in it, and then you stop it with your finger, and then you put it in a test tube and lift your finger just enough until the right amount comes out.

I mean, if you're doing mouth pipetting with viruses, you may give an extra slurp and you don't want that virus coming in your mouth.

So but you got up to one point and you expelled it, you know, it didn't happe often, that we sucked too hard.

And if we did, we just ran to the sink and tried to wash it out as best we could and hope for the next two weeks.

Every time you have aches or paid your fingers, well, let's see what's the incubation period of the process and when do I start feeling it?

But, it' something you have to work with in that you're very careful all the time.

Bump into Jessie.

Wright, Doctor Wright.

Was the medical director at the D.T.

Watson home.

And I knew that she was involved with kids and trying to restore their limbs.

And I says, how are things going?

She says, looking pretty good about our way.

She emphasized tha and suddenly hit me on our way.

That's where sock is going to test the kids D.T.

Watson.

Well, they couldn't confirm it when anyone saw it.

Wouldn't tell me the Watson home were all kids who had been exposed to who had had polio.

So in some sense, there's less risk involved.

And so Doctor Jessie, wright, worked with my father and courageously allowed her kids at that institution to be the first to receive the vaccine.

These are a group of people that were very visionary.

They knew that they suffered and they wanted to help other people, not so.

And the peopl who were here to watch at home explain this to the kids that, hey, what we're trying is something new that's going to hel other people may not help you, but the children, all the parents of the children were all for too.

D.T.

Watso Home was unique in a lot of ways from institutions that deal with people with disabilities, because they didn't promote you to be a handicapped person.

They called it that time.

You weren't a handicapped person, you were a person with a disability.

You had a future.

They made it to be like it.

Where you were going to be home.

It was a home.

And before you got out of there, you had to pass a functional test so that you could cope with your home life.

And it was a victory for everybody around.

Everything.

Bragg when somebody else somebody took a first step today or they held their pencil, they they said hello.

Because we had patients with tracheotomy as well.

They weren't unhappy.

It's hard to imagine saying that to yo now that they were not unhappy.

Many of them cried when they left.

They did not know how to go home because they had been home for so long.

The cancer rate was lik the commander and we all listen.

When Jessie spoke, in fact, we sometimes trembled when Jessie spoke.

She was sort of fearsome.

But you respected it becaus she was so good and so sincere.

Big Jessie is a big woman.

I think she could lift an iron lung, but very approachable.

Very, sociable.

Jonas, if you asked him a question, he often answered with a question.

Whereas Jessie know she'd give you the answer.

I remembe when I first went into the gym to learn how to use crutches.

The first thing she did was make me fall.

She said, well, you're going to fall.

We want to teach you how to fall.

And I thought that was so mean.

Jessie, wright, took a liking to me as they did at Municipal Hospital.

I must have been one heck of a kid, but she took a liking to me, and I was one, one person in the first group of polio victims who they had tried the polio vaccine on to see how it would react to people had already contracted polio.

And then thought, oh boy, this is great.

I'm going to get the shot.

I'm going to go run, ru and walk again and go play ball.

Doctor said no, it's not going to prevent what happened.

It's going to prevent it to happening to other peopl like your brother.

I said, fine.

And what he was looking for was what would happen to the antibody levels in those childre who had already been exposed to that type of polio virus when they were injected with this experimental vaccine preparation, he showed that you can induce an immune response.

That clearly was a memory response and that broke the orthodoxy.

It broke the orthodoxy, frankly, that was established by the leading virologist at the time.

And when he was, in that sense, a good decade ahead of his time.

And he proved it.

And still people didn't believe it.

When my father saw that injecting these kids caused an increase in their antibody levels, that was the moment that the whole thing was done for him.

He knew that it was possible to immunize humans effectively with this inactivated preparation.

Is he nervous when he begins human testing?

Of course he's nervous.

He literally goes to those places every night to see how the kids are doing.

But they had tremendous faith in Jonas Salk.

He was a father.

He tested the vaccine on himself.

He tested the vaccine on his children Yes, Donna.

His wife, she says, oh, yeah, He gave the kids the shots.

They screamed.

There's a picture of me getting a vaccination.

It's clearly a set up shot.

I mean, it's just a wonderful quintessential 50s photograph.

But I'm there with a white shirt and a bow tie, and my father has this arm staring intently as as was his want.

I mean, if he was involved in a procedure, it was like he was completely focused on not giving me the injection.

My mother is gazing admiringly at him and I' looking at the camera with this, you know, tears welling up in my eyes and my lower lip out, just essentially saying, can somebody get me out of here?

Doesn't anybody know I'm here?

Kind of kind of.

Look, I mean, it wasn't fair to go ask other people to take the vaccine when we didn't take it ourselves.

So we vaccinate one another, vaccinate our children before we went to the world, researchers invariably tested on their own children if they have children.

I tested our rotavirus vaccine on my then infant son will in 1992 for a vaccine that was licensed in 2006.

I mean, and so it's not a leap for the scientists because the scientists fully believe that this is safe and effective.

One of the big obstacles was t to scale up what we were doing as we were making homebrewed batches of vaccine.

And that's why, first of all, Baisley was recruited because he had experience in Australia making large scale production of penicillin during World War.

I we converted egg incubators, putting stainless steel shells in there so they could rotate around and get their shelves moving up and down.

We could put our big bottles on their character.

He brought big jugs and big flasks, whereas, you know, we had to use test tubes and they figured one monkey could supply 6000 doses of vaccine.

So that was a lot of money because because of the wa the tissue was used and grown.

After Salk ran successful tests in the Watson School, the March of Dimes felt tha before he began his huge public health experiment that he was going to have to run a small study in the schools in and surrounding Pittsburgh.

And I think there was a tremendous pride that it was being don in their city with their money involving people in their community.

Once the word started getting around about some progress being made, there was no lack of volunteers.

I mean, parents were willin to turn their kids right over.

They were convinced long before saw this was going to work.

This is it.

What is just amazing is how easy Salk found it, not only to round up to 7500 kids, but to round up pediatricians were willing to give the shots.

Nurses who were willing to stand by, people who are willing to show for these kid back and forth, record keepers.

No one was being paid for this.

It was all done voluntarily.

And I think there was a sense in Pittsburgh that they were on the cusp of history.

With the March of Dimes did, in terms of consent, was actually brilliant.

You were just not giving your consent.

You were actually pleading with the March of Dimes to have your child become part of this pathbreaking study.

There was a tremendous level of trust then that is not seen today.

And then for example if you look at the consent forms that were obtained for children that did volunteer for a polio vaccine, it's a three by five inch card that says, I allow my child to participate in a trial of an experimental polio vaccine, and then there's a place to sign on the bottom.

That's it.

That was the consent form.

If you look at the consent form today, for example, the rotavirus vaccine it was 15 pages, single spaced.

They probably had one paragrap that discussed the disease and and 14.5 pages that talked about possible side effects and consequences.

People responded by the hundreds, and there were accounts of people with bringing their grandchildren in from out of state to get the vaccination because they wanted to make sure that they were protected.

The doctors would not tell the parents which school he was going to be at the next morning, he says, I want them to go to school, like to just go on a class, because then they'd be uptight all night.

They wouldn't sleep, the parents would be anxious, he says.

And I don't want the parents do.

It's easier to give a kid a shot when the parent isn't standing over the kid's shoulder.

Well, they had it lined up and they called a name, and then they said it to you, and you were supposed to verify it.

And then we were called into the area behind the screen and given a little stiff bear to hold onto while we got the shot.

The needle was very long and very thick looking and basically fearsome, which is why I spen a lot of time squeezing the bear and looking at the windows in the books.

It was sort of a reddish fruit.

I remember remember trying to be brave, not crying.

And I remember how delighted my mother was.

My mother used to say, better you should cry than I should cry.

And in essence sort of set it all this.

This was viewed as a miracle.

We would help hold the children and calm them down, and he would talk to them too.

He was very, very good with children and I think he was a comforting person.

That concern, that relationship, that joy in some sense that he took interacting one on one with people he really enjoyed.

When he got to do that.

That was really a quality tha he had that showed everywhere.

And my brother Tommy, he hated it.

He would try to corner him and he'd run under tables, under chairs, screaming, screaming his head off.

And he didn't care abou the cookies in the orange juice.

He just didn't want to get a shot.

My sister, my oldest one, was a fighter.

She fought them tooth and nail.

They had to actually put her on a prone cart and hold her down to give her the shot.

It turns out later tha it wasn't the fear, the needle.

She thought they were giving her polio.

What I had already had and she didn't want it.

Parents were lining up their kids for a vaccine that no one could assure them was safe, and no one could assure them it would work.

But they had tremendous faith in Jonas Salk and his team.

They had tremendous faith in his humanity, and they had tremendous faith in his scientific ability.

It is not only a national crusade, it's really it's a humanitarian crusade.

And generations of kids afterward are going to benefit from this.

It said he was glad that our our kids could participate in the vaccine trials.

I was a nervous wreck, frankly.

I was scared to take them and scared not to take them.

So I had to take them.

But you know, we weren't sure what this whole thing was, an experiment at that point.

The vaccine.

I think with my father there were two parallel things going on complete and absolut confidence in what he was doing.

I don't thin there was a doubt in his mind.

And yet at the same time, there's always doubt.

There's always question, is it going to work?

As a virologist and a researcher, it's interesting to watch how this plays out.

When you first start to work on a vaccine, you're trying to understand it.

You're trying to understand what part of the virus makes you sick, what part of the virus, and induces an immune response which protects you but not caused disease.

And now you think you've got it.

But then, as I think this is an old Chinese expression, you know, when the gods are really angry, they grant your wish.

You get your wish, which is now it's going to be tested in a big phase three trial.

And so you hold your breath.

It's a tremendous leap until you put them into children.

You're not going to really know whether or not something is effective and frankly, more importantly, safe.

And and it's it's a testament to his courage and resolve that he could inoculate children with something that he knew started ou as live, dangerous polio virus.

And although you can you can do studies in cells in mice, you never really know that's true until you put it in people.

Jonas Salk for all of his self-confidence, cannot possibly say that there is no chance of a ki getting polio from my vaccine.

Vaccines are always a matter of risk versus reward, and nothing is perfect.

Nothing is perfect.

And these are his neighbor's children.

He was sticking with this dead virus.

That's not like inoculating someone in another continent.

It was very real.

There are children who played Little League with his sons.

There were, you know, there were children whose parents he saw walking in the streets, Squirrel Hill or in Oakland work at the university.

So if you had had harmed them, he would have been in a very, very difficult situation.

This is always about May I present this little bottle to you as a symbol of our hope, that victory over infantile paralysis is almost here.

It's time.

America, time for Walter Winchell, the man who gives America the news.

Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror and The Washington Post.

On the eve of the field trials, Walter Winchell opened up his broadcast.

Mothers and Fathers of America.

They're preparing coffins for your children because they're going to b doing this experiment on them, and some of your children are going to die.

Walter Winchell wa a yellow journalist of his time.

He believed, as he said, that the way to become famous is to throw a brick at people that are famous.

And that's what he did to Jonas Salk.

But I think that when Jonas Salk chose to make a vaccine that was funded by the March of Dimes, he signed up for being responsive to the American public.

And so when people raised false concerns, I think it was his obligation to stand up and fend off that concern by trying to explain science to the public.

Not an easy thing, but I do think that was his obligation, and he saw that as his obligation to study that my associates and I have been doing at the University of Pittsburgh have indicated clearly that it is possible to induc antibody formation in children, by suitable injections with a kill virus vaccine.

More than that, it appears that, there are no harmful ill effect accompanying these inoculations.

It didn't hurt, did it?

Okay.

O'Connor said you have to do this in order to get your vaccine done.

Jonas.

There's certain things you need to do.

And again, he was able and willing to do the necessary things to get things done, even if it wasn't exactly in his line of work.

Scientists are a reticent lot.

I mean, they the they generally avoid the light.

They work quietly in their rooms and try and come up with something new.

Salk was unique in the sense that he was put forward, I think, by a very large public relations group that was funded by the March of Dimes as a scientist who was going to help save our lives.

And I think scientists were jealous of that when peers were critical, when there was were attempts to derail what he wanted to do, I imagine that he would have had a sense of aggravation and frustration.

But my father had a sense of what was right in nature, and it was that that he cleaved to what anyone else said, whatever dogma, there was absolutely no difference to him.

Now, I remember asking Julie Younger is this safe enough?

Julie says, hey, this is like saying, is the pregnant woman pregnant enough?

He says, if it's safe, it's safe.

If she's pregnant, she's pregnant.

I says, okay, I take your word for it.

In April 1954, field trials of the Salk polio vaccine begin in dozens of selecte communities throughout America, and the largest such test ever conducted.

1,800,000 children volunteere to participate in the vaccine, which has obsessed Jonas Salk for years, now begins to pass out of his hands when Thomas Francis, who wa put in charge of the field trial that would ultimately become the largest field trial of a vaccine ever performed, and I think will remain the largest field trial of the vaccine ever performed.

There was a question about how to do it.

Can you do a trial where you give half the children, say the vaccine, and don' give vaccine to the other half, and then watch what happens?

I mean, Salk believed in his vaccine, but the only way to know whether it was safe was to have a group that hadn't been inoculated.

Now, Salk didn't want these controlled.

He thought it was morall reprehensible to give some kids the vaccine and knowingly withhold it from some others.

He knew tha this vaccine was going to work, and went against his nature to be allowing kids to go unimmunized that otherwise would be able to get vaccine.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and where he was being so guided by his heart was able to be counterbalanced, and the field trial was indeed structure as a placebo controlled trial.

The fact that he did agree to a placebo controlled trial was a major, major loss in the evaluation, and that has become the gol standard for testing vaccines, both for effectiveness and safety.

In the early months of 1975, the final tabulation of the Salk field trial results is being complete at the University of Michigan.

A big announcement was going to be made on April 12th, so the pitch was going up in terms of press coverage of this as a seminal event in medical history, it takes a full yea for the results to be analyzed.

Everybody's nervous.

Jonas Salk is confident but doesn't know.

No one tells him.

This is Tuesday, April 12th, 1955, a day which may well mark the most significan event in all of medical history.

During the past few months, the results of last year's mass trial of Doctor Jonas Salk.

Had he polio vaccine has been evaluated, the world will very soon know whether the battle against the disease that has twisted hundreds of thousands of young bodies has been one.

My father was deeply concerned when the field trial was being planned.

It was decided that it was going to be necessary to add Matthias methylated a preservative, to the vaccine, whereas my father knew th polio vaccine was going to work.

I don't know how confident he was that this large scale field trial was going to come out with the results he had anticipated.

Salk feared that that that preservative would actually damage the vaccine viruse and render them less effective.

And that really upset song.

I mean, he took this seriously.

I mean it was called the Salk vaccine.

It wasn't just calle the inactivated polio vaccine.

He knew his name was on it and his heart was in it.

And he he didn't want to watch what he had to watch, which was stand back and see the government allowing for a less effective vaccine.

If the results from the observed study areas are employed, the vaccine could be considered to have been 60 to 80% effectiv against paralytic poliomyelitis.

There is, however, greater confidence in the results obtained from the strictly controlled and almost identical test populations of the placebo study areas.

On this basis, it may be suggested that vaccination was 80 to 90, 80 to 90% effective against paralytic poliomyelitis.

And s when Jonas Salk had his moment, he could have stepped up there and done what Neil Armstrong did, which is to say one step for for man, one giant leap for mankind, something obviously, that was practiced.

Jonas Salk had plenty of time to practice his speech.

He could have done that.

But he was so obsessed with the notion of trying to make the best, perfect vaccine that all he could talk about were ways in which the vaccine could be made better.

It tells you a lot about the man, and I think that more than anything else, tells you why he was so successful at making the vaccine because he was always restless, never satisfied, because, like any scientist, he knew that there really isn't that moment of just sheer sort of joy that is unalloyed with with pain, or at least unalloyed with doubt.

The guy gets off the elevator and he hits the runway.

He never got into the room.

Everybody's yellow.

Give me absolute from the Universit service stands up on this table.

He just told them, give me one.

Listen.

Me or whatever his name was.

It works.

It works.

They were yelling.

There were newspaper reporters that ran to telephones to quickly get this as a front page headline on probably every newspaper in this country.

This was his moment.

It was a mob scene in Ann Arbor.

I can remember that day so well.

Television sets we set up in our school, kids ran out into the street.

School was called, you know, factory whistles went off, church bells, tall people were crying.

It was in ways if a war had ended and the way a war had ended, you.

It was like.

It was like something jus being lifted, like just on.

Oh.

And I'm like, I just can't believe it.

It's over.

I mean, it's over for millions and millions of children.

You can't describe it.

They were just, We are part of this.

We help, we helped.

We helped.

And everybody was goin joyous and glad.

Doctor.

wright The staff, the staff was ecstatic after that.

The mailbags poured in.

I mean, we had mailbags like you wouldn't believe.

Letters and money and movie office began to come in.

Three studios were very interested, and the rumors that Marlon Brando was going to play Jonas Salk.

When the vaccine was declared safe, potent and effective, the Jonas Salk became a national hero.

You know, he was on the cover of time.

Newsweek called hi one of the greatest Americans.

He got the Congressional Medal of Freedom, president Eisenhowe invited him to the white House and actually broke down.

A few people had ever seen Ike do this, he said, I just don't have the words to thank you.

I said as your grandfather, this is a sign of how great medicine is, and particularly how great American medicine is at this time.

It is in an extraordinarily wonderful, optimistic moment.

Okay.

And there is reason to be proud.

When the vaccine became successful, Salk did what the best scientists do.

And what's the most moral of them?

Do the most humanitarian.

I can do.

And he said, this is a vaccine for the people.

You know, this is not a vaccine for my personal profit.

And he made the famous statement, you can't patent the sun.

The sun is for the people.

This vaccine is science.

gift to the people was an extraordinary act.

It was an absolutely extraordinary moment in time.

And there were so many streams that fed into this.

I think it really has to be remembered.

This wasn't the work of one person.

Everyone else in the laboratory doctor, young Nerd, Jim Lewis, Byron Bennett, Val Baisley.

These people were remarkable in terms of their their flexibility, their dedication, their willingnes just to roll up their sleeves, plunge in, do whatever was necessary to get this done.

What happened with the vaccine?

It involved a particula kind of optimism, a particular kind of understanding and belief in science.

A particular kind of that we have heroes we have people who can do this.

And but I think my dad asked himself every day of the rest of his life, why can't this happen about other things?

Why can't this happen about poverty?

Why can't this happen about public health?

In a whole lot of ways, we have so many answers The Salk vaccine was unique.

It was unique in the sense that that it was a decision really made by the American people to try and defeat a disease.

And so everyone was part of this.

It was our vaccine.

And I do think it's in us.

I absolutely believe it's in us.

When you see moments like 911 happen where any tragedy happened, our instinct, I think, is always to act as a group.

And it's refreshing, I think to, to to see what we could do.

We'll neve have a public health experiment like that again for all kinds of reasons.

I think we would hope, though, that we would have moments like this.

Again, the beauty of polio was that it was a disease that could be conquered by enormous human effort.

I mean, it is just the story of an extraordinary success, a success that involve tens of thousands of Americans working really overtime to find a way to fight a horrific disease.

And the beauty of Jonas Salk is that he was the man who sort of crystallized this.

He is the people's scientist.

Whom do we remember?

Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, its perfect.