Who is Jonas Salk?
Jonas Salk was an American microbiologist and scientific researcher who lived from 1914-1995. Although Salk is most famously remembered for his work on the polio vaccine in the 1950s, he also contributed a number of advances to infectious disease prevention and treatment. Around the world, Jonas Salk is viewed as a hero in many communities, since millions of people have avoided potentially fatal polio infections with the assistance of his famous vaccine. Salk was born into a Jewish New York family in 1914. When he initially went to university, he studied law, but he ended up switching to medicine, graduating in 1939. In the 1940s, Jonas Salk worked at the University of Michigan, studying influenza. His studies became extremely important during the Second World War, when influenza infection posed a major risk to American soldiers overseas. Salk was among the first to recognize that a killed virus could be used in vaccine production to make a much safer and equally productive vaccine, an
