Jonas Salk laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus
Jonas Salk of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis." Concerning his last year of medical school Salk says: