Salk Polio Vaccine: The Lab That Ended a Terror

For the first half of the twentieth century, polio stalked American summers. Parents kept children away from swimming pools, movie theaters, anywhere crowds gathered. Then, at the University of Pittsburgh's Virus Research Laboratory a few blocks from here, Jonas Salk and his team spent seven years changing that.

From nineteen forty-eight to nineteen fifty-five, they developed and tested the world's first effective polio vaccine. The announcement came on April twelfth, nineteen fifty-five, the tenth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's death, a president who had himself contracted polio. Church bells rang across the country.

Mass inoculation campaigns followed, and by nineteen sixty-two polio had been virtually eradicated in the United States. What had been one of the most feared diseases in America was reduced to a historical footnote within a single decade, because of work done in this Pittsburgh laboratory.