Hilary Koprowski and the First Oral Polio Vaccine

Just off Thirty-Seventh and Spruce in Philadelphia stands the Wistar Institute, one of the oldest independent biomedical research facilities in the United States. Its most transformative director was Hilary Koprowski, a Polish-born virologist who arrived here in nineteen fifty-seven and ran the institute for thirty-four years.

Koprowski had already made history before he ever walked through these doors. In nineteen fifty, he administered the first successful live oral polio vaccine to a human subject, years before the Salk injectable vaccine reached the public. His oral approach, which uses a weakened live virus to train the immune system, became the model for global eradication campaigns.

At Wistar he drove landmark work on vaccines for rubella, rabies, and rotavirus, and he pioneered the use of monoclonal antibodies to diagnose and target cancer.