The American physician, virologist, and immunologist Jonas Edward Salk (1914-1995) developed the first effective poliomyelitis (polio) vaccine.

Jonas Salk was born in New York City on Oct. 28, 1914. At the age of 16 he entered the College of the City of New York with the thought of studying law. He decided instead to study medicine and in 1934 enrolled in the College of Medicine of New York University, from which he graduated in 1939. He interned at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital from 1940 to 1942, when he went to the University of Michigan, where he helped develop an influenza vaccine. In 1944 he was appointed research associate in epidemiology, and in 1946 he was made assistant professor.

In 1947 Salk accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh as associate professor of bacteriology, where he carried out his researches on a polio vaccine. Polio vaccines had been attempted before but without success because, as was apparent...