Jonas Salk

An American physician and medical researcher whose inactivated polio vaccine turned one of the twentieth century's most feared epidemics into a preventable disease. Working at the University of Pittsburgh, he developed the vaccine tested in the 1954 national field trial on one million children aged six to nine, remembered as the Polio Pioneers, among the largest public health experiments ever run. On April 12, 1955 the results were announced: the vaccine was safe and effective, and mass vaccination followed across the United States and the world. Salk's decision not to patent the vaccine made him an enduring emblem of public health as a public good, and he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla in 1960, working there until his death in 1995.