urgh even though being advised against it, to work at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dean William McEllroy talked Salk into joining the university full-time. Though the school’s research budget was a grant from the American Society for the Study of High Blood Pressure in the amount of $1,800, he saw the opportunity to do two things. One was to continue the work he was doing on influenza, second was to begin working with the polio virus. A few months after arriving in Pittsburgh, Salk was visited by the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The director asked Salk if he would be willing to participate in a polio typing program. “I had no experience working with polio, but it provided me with an opportunity. . .” Salk said in an interview. This gave Salk a chance to get funding, equipment, a laboratory facility, and to hire a staff to work for and with him.Salk’s previous work gave him the idea that a killed virus could in fact work when others thought it couldn’t. To type the polio virus Salk infected monkeys with polio by injecting it into them or feeding it to them. If a monkey survived it built up antibodies to protect against the virus. The monkeys that survived were then given another type of virus to see if the same antibodies protected against the second type. If it did, it told Salk and his assistants that the two types were related. If it did not, that told Salk that they were not related. Eventually Salk and his assistants used 17,500 monkeys in the typing research. Two other polio researchers, working independently, helped Salk look for a safe vaccine. Dr. Isabel Morgan from Johns Hopkins University was trying to find a vaccine that would keep the monkeys from being infected with the polio virus. Dr. Morgan killed the polio virus with formalin, thus creating polio antibodies in monkeys without infecting them. But Dr. Morgan’s ability to gr...
