Dr Salk Polio Research

Years after the presidency of Roosevelt, Dr. Salk researched for a polio vaccine. Jonas Salk, born on October 28, 1914 (Carter 29), pursued the study of poliomyelitis on June 16, 1950 (Carter 95). Later that summer, Salk applied for a research grant on July 12 (Carter 100) from the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis, but he could not use the accepted reward for polio research until 1951 (Reis 50). Salk's first idea was to develop different testable vaccines and experiment them on multiple types of monkeys and chimpanzees (Kluger 134). To be able to test his theory, the grant gave Salk 17,000 monkeys for his procedures (Kluger 123). First, Salk deactivated polioviruses by using formaldehyde, and then, he injected the "killed" viruses
in the mammals (Reis 50). As Salk had hoped, the injected monkeys did not become ill, but instead, they produced more antibodies (Reis 51). After a year of continued success, Salk was ready to test his research on humans (Kluger 174), and he began the clinical trial in the spring of 1952 (Kluger 174). The state of Pennsylvania approved Salk's trial on humans (Kluger 174), and on June 12, 1952, he arrived at the Watson Home for Crippled Children to begin the tests on human subjects (Reis 54). Although many citizens thought the created drug was a cure, it was simply a prevention against the paralysis (Reis 52). After a month of studying and improvement of the injection, Salk administrated the first dose on July 2, 1952 (Kluger 180), to Bill Kirkpatrick (Kluger 180). Throughout the summer, Salk continued to modify his vaccine for purity (Reis 58) and eventually injected about 5,000 volunteers during his first human trial (Reis 58). With the successful trial, Salk presented it at the Committee of Immunization's meeting (Kluger 191) on January 23, 1953 (Reis 58), in Hershey, Pennsylvania (Kluger 191). In result of the meeting, Salk received another research grant (Kluger 192), so he decided to start a nationwide human trial (Reis 60). On March 26, 1953, Salk publicly announced that his national trial would begin (Kluger 200), through a nationwide broadcasted radio station (Kluger 200). To assure the injection was safe, Salk improved the vaccine for another year (Kluger 252), and the trial started in the spring of 1954 (Reis 61). On April 26, 1954, the trial began (Reis 62) with the injection recipient of Randy Kerr (Kluger 275). As the winter of 1954 ended, approximately 1.8 million people received the vaccine (Kluger 283), and on April 12, 1955, Salk met with the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis to review his trials (Reis 65). In presentation, the vaccine showed to be 68 percent functional for type I polio (Kluger 294), 90 percent functional for type II polio (Reis 66), and 92 percent functional for type III polio (Kluger 294).
At 10:00 A.M. on April 12, the foundation announced that the vaccine was safe, as well as effective (Seavey, Smith, and Wagner 174), and at 5:30 P.M., the federal government of the United States agreed to give manufacture and distribution rights for the production of the vaccine (Seavey, Smith, and Wagner 175). The people of the world named the vaccine after Salk, which was the "Salk Vaccine" (Reis 67), and by 1959, there were, on average, less than 10,000 polio cases a year (Bruno 291). Even though Salk created a life-saving vaccine, he never obtained a Nobel Prize for his successful research (Reis 71). When June 23, 1995 approached, Jonas Salk lived his last day and died from a cardiovascular failure (Kluger 318). With trial after trial, the polio vaccine was finally discovered. Throughout his early years and into his political life, Franklin Delano Roosevelt overcame the limitations of his polio diagnosis, and as a result, the changes he made to the United States, as president, are still used today, but eventually he died too soon before Jonas Salk’s effective vaccine against poliomyelitis was
discovered.