Natural scientific research in Canada Queen's/Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston, 1845, U of T/Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, 1875, UBC/Vancouver General Hospital, 1886, Dalhousie/Victoria General Hospital, Halifax, 1887 and the U of A/ the University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton, 1906. The Connaught Laboratories in Toronto conducted groundbreaking research in the fifties with respect to the world's first polio vaccine. Working with Dr. Jonas Salk in the US, the laboratories developed a safe inactive vaccine using a new synthetic base, Medium 199. This permitted large volume production through a technique that came to be known as the "Toronto Method", which in turn allowed the mass vaccination campaigns
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