Jonas Salk in 2007, 12 years after Jonas Salk's death in 1995. Although many advances have been made in treating AIDS, "the world still waited for the miracle vaccine the conqueror of polio had sought", wrote historian Alan Axelrod. In 1966, "The New York Times" referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to "Times" journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and
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