Jonas Salk: A Life

These are the words Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs uses to describe Salk at the end of this biography and I could not agree more. Who exactly was Jonas Salk? Rarely has a scientist had as much information about him or her available to the public yet left so ambiguous an image. On the one hand, as Jacobs points out many times, Salk was a deeply genuine human being, brilliant in his single-minded approach to a scientific problem, empathetic to suffering patients, and highly likable. On the other hand, he almost never said no to the limelight (for multiple reasons), had at least later in his life several mistresses from among young women who were to him “the first person to understand me,” largely ignored his family, had few friends and, to many scientists, greatly overplayed his own scientific skills. This biography does a fine job of laying out the complex life of the discoverer of the polio vaccine and the founder of the Salk Institute.As might be expected, the book is largely in two parts. The first 214 pages cover Salk’s early life and the work with polio. The remainder of the 458 pages of text deals mostly with the origin, development and changes in the Salk Institute and Salk’s increasingly difficult relationship with the institute he founded. It also covers Salk’s later work on an AIDS vaccine, something I was unfamiliar with. Jacobs does an excellent job covering the development of the polio vaccine and the public’s reaction to it. The reader may be appalled how human trials were conducted in the first half of the 20th century. Ending polio was an end that justified what today (not then) were highly questionable means. To those who did not live through that time, it is almost impossible to imagine the fear that gripped families in the early 1950’s. (In summer I could not play in public parks or drink out of public water fountains and was told regularly that I did not want to end up in an iron lung.) People were terrified of polio. When the Salk vaccine arrived, it was as if a dam of fear broke and relief flooded the country. What Salk went through during that period is worth the price of the book alone. Probably nothing like that has occurred to a scientist in history. Pasteur and Koch were lionized in their countries in the 1800’s for their life-saving discoveries, but they did not have the media we have. Einstein is Mr. Science in the press but he did not save children’s lives. The Salk-polio story is unique in many ways and Jacobs tells it well.The Salk Institute, now one of the leading biological research institutes on the planet, was envisioned by Salk as something quite different – a place where both humanists and scientists could find a home “under one roof” for their best thought and work. It continues to be a place for superb scientific work but in a much narrower frame than Salk imagined. This part of the book is less thrilling for obvious reasons but Jacobs does a nice job of telling the story of the Institute and how Salk eventually got in the way of his own work. Salk was never completely accepted by the scientific community and the reader will be left, along with Jacobs, to ponder why. He was viewed as a “kitchen chemist” who did not follow scientific protocol and was far too interested in making Life Magazine than in building solid scientific research. It is incredibly hard to tell how much of the criticism is accurate and how much is the jealousy that comes about from scientific competition and watching the other guy (Salk in this case) become a world famous household name beloved by millions. This is another of the paradoxes Jacobs brings out – the discoverer of the polio vaccine who could never get elected to the National Academy of Sciences.This book has received some criticism because it deals with Salk’s personal life too much. It only does that in a couple chapters and I do not think the biography would be complete without it. A sign that Salk may have been far more competent that many thought in science was his work late in his life on an AIDS vaccine. He did not just dabble but was able to produce work that advanced the field. However, once again Salk did his trials by “getting around” the FDA regulations partly through using his famous name recognition but doing it, Jacobs implies, because he cared deeply about the fact that people were dying while the government fiddled. Many scientists have lived lives of controversy and had personal lives that did not match the public image. We just have much more data today and a media that hounds people and then makes them or breaks them in the popular mind. It would seem that, despite the many flaws in Salk’s life and the image projected by the media and supported by Salk, he may have deserved better from his scientific peers. We get clues in the book (such as Albert Sabin’s unrelenting hostility to Salk and the acceptance of the Sabin vaccine over Salk’s) but ultimately we are simply left unsure as to reasons. Jacobs’ biography of Salk gives the reader a great deal to think about – both about who this man was and how the public and the scientific community reacted to him. It is a fine book.

No one born after about 1950 is likely to have any living memory of the abject fear that seized hold of the American psyche under the annual threat of polio. But I remember.Early in the 1950s, as polio steadily grew more prevalent with every succeeding summer, I grew from childhood into adolescence, prime years for susceptibility to what was more properly (though misleadingly) called infantile paralysis. Most of my friends chafed under the near-hysteria of their parents, but my father was a doctor: there was no hysteria in our household. Instead, I was quickly spirited out of town to rural summer camps where polio was rare.Then, with hope rising as a result of increasingly more optimistic field tests beginning in 1953, headlines around the world finally blared in the spring of 1955, “Polio is Defeated!” A young doctor, barely more than forty years old, had developed a safe and effective vaccine with financial support exclusively from what was popularly known as the March of Dimes. (That organization was very different from its successor today, which focuses on premature birth and birth defects.) Salk become an instant global star. In many communities, the celebrations that ensued rivaled those that capped the victories in World War II. The doctor’s now well-known name was Jonas Salk. Now, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, both a physician and a biographer, has written what may be the definitive story of the man’s life. It’s an outstanding piece of work, and an eye-opener.The polio wars: Salk vs. SabinSalk’s vaccine, technically a “killed virus vaccine” administered by injection, came into existence only because Salk used an unconventional approach and doggedly persevered in his research despite the loud protestations of other virologists. Most prominent among the chorus of naysayers was Albert Sabin, a rival researcher whose oral “live virus vaccine” against polio came into wide use only in the 1960s. Even after an enormous field test proved Salk’s vaccine to be both safe and effective, Sabin and others continued to insist loudly that a killed virus vaccine was dangerous and should not be administered. This led the FDA to call a temporary halt to the administration of the vaccine. Later, it also came to be reflected in the adoption by the U.S. government of the oral vaccine as the sole option offered in the United States. For a number of years, the Salk variant was no longer even manufactured in the U.S.Nonetheless, from 1955 until 1961, Salk’s vaccine reduced the incidence of polio in the United States by ninety-seven percent. In Sweden and Finland, where it was fully adopted, the vaccine totally eliminated polio. Despite this near-flawless record Sabin and others continued to object to the use of Salk’s formulation. When Sabin’s rival vaccine was put into wide use, dozens of Americans eventually contracted paralytic polio as a result, exactly as Salk had predicted. Only years later, once Salk had perfected a more advanced formulation of the killed virus vaccine, was it offered as an option in the United States.Sabin never acknowledged in any way the damage his vaccine had done, and for the rest of his life continued to undermine Salk in scientific circles, as did a number of other prominent researchers. Though idolized in the press and among the public, Salk was virtually a pariah in the scientific community, at least in part because the press had made him a celebrity. (Clearly, his unpopularity within the scientific establishment was also a result of his insistence on working in his own way, without regard for others’ views.) He was essentially blackballed in the Nobel committee and was never admitted to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.Influenza, multiple sclerosis, and AIDSPolio was only one of several diseases Jonas Salk investigated. Barely out of medical school, he and his mentor produced the first influenza vaccine in 1938. His search for a cure for MS showed great promise in the eyes of neurologists, who found his contributions significant, but was denigrated by many of the same virologists who seemed to disapprove of everything he did. Unfortunately, that research ended prematurely when his patron at the National MS Society suddenly died. Salk had many talents, but fundraising wasn’t one of them.Then, in the 1980s, Salk played a major role in research on AIDS. Early on, he took upon himself to negotiate a compromise between the French and American doctors who both claimed to have first identified HIV. It took two years but finally he succeeded, making possible collaborations that might well otherwise have been out of the question. Then he turned his attention to the development of a vaccine against HIV. Once again, his work was bitterly criticized — because he insisted on taking an unconventional approach. The prevailing wisdom was that a vaccine could only be developed on the basis of one portion of the HIV molecule; Salk insisted on using the whole molecule, which subjected him to ridicule for having ignored recent advances in medical research. However, he was proven right again. Initial trials of his vaccine showed promise and those developed by his critics utterly failed, but the criticism didn’t stop. It never stopped. (No successful AIDS vaccine has ever been developed, despite many promising starts. Research has focused largely on treatment to slow or prevent the progression of the disease.) Sabin continued to bad-mouth Salk at every opportunity — at scientific conferences, in science journals, and in Congressional testimony — until the end of his life. Salk’s forbearance, and his refusal to answer Sabin in kind, was legendary.Founding the Salk InstituteHe didn’t want to name it after himself. The scientific research center he founded in La Jolla, California, in 1960, came to be named the Salk Institute only because the principal fundraiser insisted that he could only raise the necessary money if Salk’s name were attached. In fact, throughout his life, Salk was generally soft-spoken, self-effacing, and unpretentious. He was horrified that the polio vaccine he developed came to be known popularly as the “Salk vaccine.” Whenever possible, he shunned publicity; unfortunately, that was rarely possible.Salk was, in a word, a nice guy. Expecting him to be cold and uncaring, his teachers in medical school and, later, in his residency discovered that he was solicitous and sensitive in his dealings with patients. And he almost never replied in kind to any of the criticism directed toward him in the scientific community. However, his personal life was marred in several ways: his single-minded devotion to his work caused him to neglect his wife and three sons, and, later in life, before and during his second marriage, he appears to have had numerous affairs.About the authorCharlotte DeCroes Jacobs, M.D., is an Emerita Professor of Medicine at Stanford. There, she engaged in cancer research and served as Director of the Clinical Cancer Center. Jonas Salk is her second medical biography, following Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease. An award-winner both for her work in medicine as well as her writing, Jacobs has also been honored for her acting and singing.

The stirring backstory of Jonas Salk is here explored in depth by the skilled pen of Charlotte Jacobs, who, through extensive research and dozens of interviews, casts Salk as a fascinating, strong-willed, and multifaceted individual who is nevertheless haunted by detractors and fellow investigators possibly motivated, in part, by professional envy. Jacobs' writing is sensitive, compelling, and masterful. Salk's ambition, drive, intuition, compassion, trustworthiness, patience, and humor are thoroughly examined and placed into perspective with his personal foibles, which some would label considerable. While running to 559 pages (hardcover edition), the book is nevertheless easy to read. Its thirty-two chapters are each concise, focused, thorough, and well-annotated. In an appended acknowledgement chapter, the author relates how she became personally attracted to the medium of biography and how she developed her talent for it. With Jonas Salk: a Life, Jacobs demonstrates her immense skill at creating a compelling drama of personality, temperament, and character.

Very informative and well written. A man of many parts though at time controversial. The author has done justice to the character without being biased.

Libro arrivato puntuale e in buone condizioni.Molto ben documentato e di facile lettura in inglese.Biografia che va assolutamente letta

The story loses interest after the discovery and roll out of the polio vaccine. The politics of setting up an institution, which occupy several chapters, are dull, and rehashing Salk's love life is a little tawdry.Still,the first half of the book is quite enthralling and definitely worth reading, especially if you are of a scientific bent.

Excellent, but slightly one sided.