Jonas Salk is an American virologist who developed the first effective vaccine against polio. The disease had reached epidemic proportions before the vaccine was discovered and was often called as the most dreadful disease of 20th century. Salk not only made the vaccine but also did not patent it so as to make it cheaper and easily available.
In 1954, over 300,000 doctors, nurses, schoolteachers and other volunteers across the United States, Canada and Finland took part in one of the most complex and monumental medical trials in history. The plan was to test the effectiveness of a newly-developed vaccine for a disease that was devastating the lives of children across the US: polio. It was a monumental task, a double-blind experiment, in which 650,000 school children were given the vaccine, 750,000 were given a placebo, and over 400,000 children acted as a control group and were given…
