Healers

Jonas Salk

Physician and Virologist

Citation Formats

General Reference

Medicine Atlas. "Jonas Salk." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/jonas-salk.

APA Style

Medicine Atlas. (n.d.). Jonas Salk. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/jonas-salk

BibTeX

@misc{medicineatlas-jonas-salk,
  author = {Medicine Atlas},
  title = {Jonas Salk},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/jonas-salk},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Jonas Salk was an American physician and virologist who developed the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, using inactivated (killed) poliovirus injected into the bloodstream. Announced in 1955 after a nationwide field trial involving more than a million children, the vaccine sharply reduced polio cases in the United States within a few years. Salk chose not to patent the vaccine so it could be produced and distributed as widely and cheaply as possible; asked who owned the patent, he is widely quoted as replying, Could you patent the sun?

Facts

Birth Year

1914 1

Death Year

1995 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Held Differently

Albert Sabin

Developed a competing, later polio vaccine strategy (live oral vs. Salk's injected inactivated vaccine); this atlas already records the eradication-strategy tradeoff as an open question.

Source Albert Sabin (Wikipedia)