In 1954, Jonas Salk, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and developer of the first polio vaccine, became an international hero to the generations of parents who worried every summer when their children went to a playground, swimming pool, or movie theater—anywhere people congregated and the poliovirus silently lurked. They were haunted by images of row after row of iron-lung respirators and boys and girls in leg braces and wheelchairs. Now there was a prospect of those images disappearing from the modern world. On April 12, 1955, in what became one of the most
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