JEFFREY KLUGER
CONVERSATION
JONAS SALK WAS HOME WITH HIS WIFE, BUT SHE COULD tell his mind was elsewhere—back in his lab, where work was proceeding apace on what would become the first vaccine against polio. “Why Jonas,” said Donna Salk, according to TIME’s March 29, 1954, cover story, “you’re not listening to me at all.”
“My dear,” he was said to have joked, “I’m giving you my undevoted attention.”
That Jonas Salk’s devotions lay elsewhere was well known to his intimates. They lay in the battle against polio—a disease that had killed or paralyzed more than 52,000 American boys and girls in a single summer just two years earlier. They lay in his yearslong effort to develop a vaccine against the disease. And they lay too in the great field trial that was to begin just weeks after the TIME cover appeared, during which more than 2 million American schoolchildren would be queuing up to receive either Salk’s vaccine or a placebo. It would be the greatest, most sprawling public-health experiment conducted before or since.
When TIME visited Salk, the scientist was battling pushback from an anti-vaccine community similar to the one that has persisted into the 21st century. Radio personality Walter Winchell had helped spread the dark lie that warehouses around the country were stockpiling little white coffins to hold the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of children who would surely be claimed by Salk’s infernal potion. As the field trial approached, those rumors did their work, with multiple communities in multiple states pulling out of the experiment, forcing Salk and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis—the nonprofit that was backing his work—to scramble for replacement populations or to sweet-talk the walkouts back into the trial. What Salk needed, and what he got from TIME’s coverage, was an endorsement of his scientific bona fides.
It is too great a stretch to say any one story could be credited with the success of the field trial that would follow. But it is not too much to say that the public came to trust the scientist—and that the scientist delivered. On April 12, 1955, one year after the field trial began, the polio vaccine was declared safe, effective, and powerful. Generations on, polio is at the brink of extinction, run to ground in just two remaining countries—Afghanistan and Pakistan—where it causes only a handful of cases each year. The disease that was once a global scourge will soon follow smallpox into the epidemiological history books. The work began with Salk, a man with a story that once need
