David Bodian

David Bodian was an American medical scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who worked in polio research. He was born on 15 May 1910 and died on 18 September 1992. In the early 1940s he helped lay the groundwork for the later development of polio vaccines by combining neurological research with the study of how poliomyelitis develops in the body. His understanding of the disease led to a series of crucial discoveries that paved the way for the vaccine finally developed by Jonas Salk and later by Albert Sabin. For this work he received the E. Mead Johnson Award in Pediatrics and the Karl Spencer Lashley Award, along with numerous other distinctions.