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 "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