Salk Hall Salk Hall Jonas Salk Hall at the University of Pittsburgh is a Pennsylvania state and Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation Historic Landmark. The Art Deco building is named after Jonas Salk, who conducted his research on the first polio vaccine in a basement laboratory while on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. The main structure of Salk Hall is the former city owned Pittsburgh Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases constructed in 1941 on land the university had given to the city. It was designed by Richard Irving and Theodore Eicholz. The hospital was built as a project by President
Jonas Salk "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so." In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the laboratory of Thomas Francis at