JONAS SALK
A Life
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
Oxford University Press; 559 pages; $34.95
Nobody could recall a medical press conference quite like this one. On April 12, 1955, families huddled around radios, as if listening to the World Series or a championship fight. Crowds watched on television sets lining department store windows. Work stopped in offices and factories as word spread and tearful celebrations erupted. "Polio Is Conquered," the headlines screamed. The vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, a 40-year-old University of Pittsburgh researcher, had been judged safe and effective following the largest public health experiment in our history.
Americans had long worshipped their athletes, inventors and war heroes - but a medical researcher? Salk was breaking new ground, whether he liked it or not. He'd become an instant celebrity, with all the baggage it entailed. A successful vaccine against polio, a viral disease that had paralysed tens of thousands of victims, mostly children, seemed almost heaven-sent.
But not everyone felt this way. As Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs makes clear in her excellent biography, Salk's public acclaim struck a sour note in much of the scientific community, where feelings of resentment and jealousy ran high against a media-created knight in a lab coat who hadn't paid his dues.
Ms Jacobs, a professor emerita of medicine at Stanford, neatly splits Jonas Salk into two "acts". The first is a vivid if by now familiar retelling of Salk's early life, medical training, foray into polio research and fateful connection to Basil O'Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, known as the March of Dimes. Unlike other researchers, who were inching along in search of a live-virus vaccine, Salk had produced a killed-virus version with impressive results. It may not have been perfect, but it took a lot less time to develop. With polio raging each summer, a sense of urgency prevailed, giving Salk the upper hand. As O'Connor put it, "He sees beyond the microscope."
In 1954, the March of Dimes sponsored the Salk vaccine polio trials. More than a million schoolchildren took part, some getting the real vaccine, others a look-alike placebo. Parents frantically pushed their children into line. They didn't need to be educated about the risks and rewards of the vaccine. The evidence was everywhere: children in leg braces, wheelchairs, iron lungs - and coffins. The Salk trials rank among the great successes of modern medicine, and Professor Jacobs tells the story as well as it's ever been told. This is science writing at its best.
Surprisingly, Professor Jacobs doesn't question Salk's version of his early career as one in which anti-Semitism and political activism played no role. Though Salk angrily denied facing religious discrimination, the record shows otherwise. Among the reasons he attended New York University (NYU)'s medical school in the 1930s is that it was one of the few places that didn't have a "Jewish quota", unlike Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Cornell. ("Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics and take no blacks at all" was Yale's mantra at the time.) A few years later, when applying for the fellowship that would start him on the road to the polio vaccine, Salk needed the blessing of his NYU mentor, Thomas Francis, a giant in the field of infectious disease. Realising that the process had as much to do with religion as with talent, Francis ended his recommendation with these carefully chosen words: "Dr Salk is a member of the Jewish race but has, I believe, a very great capacity to get on with people."
In Salk's early years, moreover, politics filled a deep personal void. Until serious trouble arose, Salk had defined himself through a wide range of political activities that colleagues described as "far left of centre" - hardly unusual for someone coming of age in New York City during the Great Depression. The end result was a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that came close to derailing his scientific career.
Amid the public accolades and professional slights, Professor Jacobs writes, "one question always hovered: What great feat would he accomplish next?" Act 2 of the biography is a poignant and elegantly crafted look at a hero in decline. Bored with laboratory work in Pittsburgh, his killed-virus vaccine now losing ground to his rival Albert Sabin's popular live-virus vaccine, Salk took a radically different path. Captivated by the physicist-novelist C P Snow's warnings about the growing cultural divide between humanists and scientists, Salk dreamt of an institute to bridge the gap. Lavishly funded by Basil O'Connor, it took shape on a spectacular bluff overlooking the Pacific near San Diego, designed by the architect Louis Kahn to reflect Salk's vision of "a work of art in which great minds could flourish". The big question, of course, was: who would come?
Salk needn't have worried, Professor Jacobs explains. The salaries were high, the responsibilities slim, the working conditions splendid. Before long, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies was attracting Nobel Prize winners from around the globe. Every American recruited there in the early years was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, with one exception: Salk himself. Some punishments are eternal.
In California, a new Salk emerged. He divorced his wife of almost 30 years and married Françoise Gilot, the talented French artist best known as the long-time mistress of Picasso. Salk now exercised, practiced yoga, wrote tepidly received books about science and spirituality, and took advantage of an obviously open marriage to have multiple affairs, documented by Professor Jacobs in perhaps excessive detail.
Professionally, Salk continued to drift. His attempts at hard science, seeking insights into cancer and multiple sclerosis, excited the media ("Jonas Salk Stalks Another Killer") but came up dry. He spent considerable time working on a killed-virus vaccine for AIDS, which looked promising for a time but ended in disappointment.
While the institute thrived in terms of cutting-edge biological research, its role in furthering the humanities, always a running joke among the elite scientists gathered there, faded quickly from view. There was worse to come. In perhaps the unkindest cut, Salk was forced to relinquish his laboratory - a devastating symbolic gesture - and given the honorary title of founding director, with a handsome salary and no role beyond the fund-raising magic of his name.
There would be one final victory, though. Believing his killed-virus polio vaccine to be safer than the live-virus version that had replaced it, Salk worked tirelessly in these years to improve its potency. Although he wouldn't live long enough to enjoy his victory, the United States went back to his vaccine in the late 1990s, and the final push to end polio worldwide will require both vaccines - Salk's and Sabin's - to finish the job.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
