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 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: