Cold War tensions and the polio vaccine Sabin vaccine from the Soviet side. However other Soviet virologists argued that the Salk vaccine could be considered safe, since the Americans tested it on their own people. They considered that the Sabin vaccine must be potentially dangerous because the Americans did not wish to test it on their own society. The documented achievement of the Sabin-Chumakov collaboration eventually trumped the ideological differences of the Cold War. Their oral live-virus vaccine became federally licensed in 1962, and used for over three decades to help eliminate polio globally, replacing the Salk vaccine. Using these vaccines, the threat of polio remains only
Jonas Salk their parents. ... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way." As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the