Pikuah Nefesh Hero: Jonas Salk College of Medicine of New York University, from which he graduated in 1939. Salk worked at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital from 1940 until 1942, when he went to the University of Michigan. There he helped develop an influenza (flu) vaccine.
Polio Polio is a disease caused by a virus. Sometimes it does not cause serious illness, but sometimes it causes paralysis. It kills people who get it, usually by paralyzing the muscles that help him or her breathe. Polio used to be common in the United States. At the height of the polio epidemic in 1952, nearly 60,000 cases with more than 3,000 deaths were reported in the United States alone.
Salk had an idea. He was going to develop a polio vaccine using dead bits of the viruses. That challenged medical practice, which held that only vaccines made of living viruses could produce effective, lasting immunity. To proceed with his work he had to hold onto a belief that was in the minority. He believed that this was something Jews had been doing for hundreds of years. Polio Vaccine In 1949 it was learned that there were three distinct types of polio viruses. This discovery provided a starting point for Salk. He prepared a dead virus vaccine effective against all three types. In 1955 the vaccine was determined to be safe for general use. The Salk vaccine is a series of three or four injections. When someone had the vaccine, that person was saved from polio. The Salk vaccine saved many lives and kept many people from paralysis. New York City wanted to honor Salk with a ticker-tape parade. He said, “No, thank you.”
Very few can say that they cured a disease that killed people. But Jonas Salk could. That is real pikuah nefesh. Early Years Jonas Salk was born October 28, 1914 to Orthodox Jewish parents in the Bronx. He was the oldest of three sons and was the most observant. “My brothers called me the little rabbi,” he said. He went to Hebrew school from the age of eight.
Later In 1963 Salk opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California. There he and his colleagues studied problems related to the body’s autoimmune reaction (the method by which the body rejects foreign material). Jonas Salk died on June 23, 1995, in Los Angeles at the age of eighty. When he died both he and his Salk Institute were working toward a cure for AIDS (an autoimmune disease).
As a child he was thin and small and did not do well at sports. He was, however, an excellent student. His mother used to tell him he would make a difference by doing something significant. Salk graduated from Townsend Harris High School, a school for exceptional students. He entered the College of the City of New York to study law, but he changed his mind and decided to go into medicine. In 1934 he enrolled in the
The work Jonas Salk did to end polio is real pikuah nefesh.
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