The day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90% effective, Jonas Salk refused to commercialize it or obtain a patent. He and polio vaccine developer Albert Bruce Sabin, a physician at Johns Hopkins, refused to make money from their discovery. Salk and Sabin had seen firsthand how polio paralyzed as many as 20,000 children each year, sentencing some to life in an iron lung machine. Our hospital had wards of them. But Salk and Sabin believed that the polio vaccine was the property of humanity. Because of their compassion, most of the world’s children quickly had access to the medical
...more
