Cold War tensions and the polio vaccine was the first polio vaccine to receive approval of the U.S. government, and was used until 1961 in America, when the Sabin vaccine was recommended to replace it. Albert Sabin, a virologist who publicly disagreed with Salk and his killed vaccine, worked on creating a vaccine with live, attenuated vaccines. Despite Cold War tensions, in January, 1956 Mikhail Chumakov, the director of Moscow's Polio Research Institute, his wife and colleague Marina Voroshilova, and Anatoli Smorodentsev, traveled to the U.S. in order to study the Salk vaccine and visited the laboratory of Albert Sabin. With the clearance of the FBI, Sabin
Jonas Salk got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer. During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology which had replaced medicine