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 known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off." For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote "The New York