The lifesaver

Jonas Salk: A Life. By Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs. Oxford University Press; 559 pages; $34.95 and £22.99.

THE 1910s were not always kind to New York. In mid-1916 the city faced a polio epidemic that killed a baby every 2½ hours. Hospitals were full, and paralysis would leave many survivors in wheelchairs, on crutches or bedridden for life. Two years later a vicious form of influenza killed over 33,000 New Yorkers and 20m worldwide.

Jonas Salk, born in 1914 in a tenement in the city, was spared. In her biography of the man who developed the first polio vaccine and played a major role in developing the first flu vaccine, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, a professor emerita of medicine at Stanford University, weaves together intimate and historical details. She paints a picture of a sensitive, genuinely kind idealist who pursued what he thought was right with gentle but unrelenting tenacity.

The first half is a fascinating—and at times nauseating—tour of vaccine-making’s past: myriad monkeys sacrificed gruesomely on the altar of science; zealous researchers drinking minced rat brain teeming with polio to prove the concoction could vaccinate; inmates of mental asylums deliberately infected with influenza. The last was a practice that Salk and his mentor, Thomas Francis, used in 1942 to test their vaccine, which became the first ever against the disease.

In 1955 Salk won the race to develop an effective polio vaccine, using a version containing poliovirus killed by chemicals. He beat the scientists promoting live-virus vaccines, most prominent among them Albert Sabin, who would remain Salk’s caustic nemesis. The previous year Ms Jacobs had been one of the second-graders vaccinated in the 14,000 American schools selected for the Salk vaccine trial; parents of children not in the trial begged for a place.

The vaccine won Salk the adoration of the public. This never faded, even though America’s health authorities chose Sabin’s oral polio vaccine in 1962, before reverting to Salk’s on safety grounds in 1999 (Sabin’s vaccine causes paralysis in rare cases)—and even though Salk never made any further important discoveries, as he veered into what he called “biophilosophy” and became busy with the Salk Institute.

His vision for the centre was of a scientific Shangri-La where biology and humanism melded, and ideas roamed free of worries about money for salaries. The emphasis on arts and humanities eventually waned, but the Salk has gone on to become one of the world’s top research institutes.

Journalists loved Salk for his soft-spoken way of explaining vaccines to television viewers, for showing them around his lab, and for posing obligingly with his unwilling family. That, Ms Jacobs surmises, is why they never published details of his many affairs. These were more common in older age, when Salk’s second wife, Françoise Gilot (a French artist who had been Picasso’s mistress) spent most of the year away. Loneliness seems to have played a role, but also a desire for the deep, intimate connection that he never found in his life.

Salk’s scientific peers, by contrast, never gave him the praise he wanted. Many detested the way he danced with the media—they thought it unbecoming of a researcher. Some claimed he gave no credit to others where it was due (they were wrong, Ms Jacobs argues). Their scorn hurt him, she thinks. But perhaps it did not matter all that much. Asked why he did not get a Nobel prize, Salk replied: “Everybody thinks I got it. So that’s fine.”