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 talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist." During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them." "If Salk the scientist sounds