Jonas Salk he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology
Jonas Salk assembled, devoted himself to this work for the next seven years. The field trial set up to test the Salk vaccine was, according to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers." Over 1,800,000 school children took part in the trial. When news of the vaccine's success was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a "miracle worker" and the day almost became a national holiday. Around the world, an immediate rush to vaccinate began, with countries including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway,