Jonas Salk Quotes

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

Are we being good ancestors?

I have had dreams, and I've had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

Who owns the patent on this vaccine?' 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

What makes your heart leap?

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

In 1955, amid the great fanfare that accompanied the initial release of the [polio] vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent. He replied, "Well, the people, I would say. Could you patent the sun?

Our greatest responsiblity is to be good ancestors.

Einstein Freud Marx Proust Mahler Mendelssohn Chagall & don’t forget Dr. Jonas Salk ... & still they hate us!

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”   (Jonas Salk)

As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?

When Jonas Salk, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found it and developed the first polio vaccine in 1952, he did not patent the lifesaving treatment. "There is no patent," Salk told the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: "Could you patent the sun?

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

I look upon ourselves as partners in all of this, and that each of us contributes and does what he can do best. And so I see not a top rung and a bottom rung - I see all this horizontally - and I see this as part of a matrix. And I see every human being as having a purpose, a destiny, if you like - the destiny that exists in each of us - and find ways and means to provide such opportunities for everyone.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, “How did it feel to fail two hundred times?” “I never failed two hundred times in my life,” Salk replied. “I was taught not to use the word ‘failure.’ I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio.

Some people are constructive, if you like. Others are destructive. It's this diversity in humankind that results in some making positive contributions and some negative contributions. It's necessary to have enough to make positive contributions to overcome the problems of each age.

There is no patent. Could you patent the Sun?

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more." Jonas Salk

Nasty thing that happened up there. It's stayed in the town's consciousness, too. Of course, tales of nastiness and murder are always handed down with slavering delight from generation to generation, while students groan and complain when they're faced with a George Washington Carver or a Jonas Salk. But it's more than that, I think. Perhaps it's due to a geographical freak.

Perhaps above all, the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into the strata becoming the underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: 'Are we being good ancecstors?

Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.

Who owns the patent on this vaccine?' 'Well, the people, I would say. There is not patent. Could you patent the sun?

Parte de la gran inquietud y de los trastornos del mundo actual se deben no tanto al cambio mismo como al paso acelerado en que se produce el cambio.

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

Good parents give their children roots and wings: roots to know where home is, and wings to fly off and practice what has been taught them.

problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines developed by Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and a virologist named Hilary Koprowski (about whose controversial career, more later) came into wide use, eventually eliminating poliomyelitis throughout most of the world. In 1988, WHO and several partner institutions

On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe. According to Richard Carter’s history of the discovery, on that day “people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, . . . took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, and forgave enemies.”4 The city of New York offered to honor Salk with a ticker-tape parade, which he politely declined.

In Erikson’s words: “A meaningful old age…serves the need for that integrated heritage which gives indispensable perspective on the life cycle. Strength here takes the form of that detached yet active concern with life bounded with death, which we call wisdom…” The notion of integrity connotes the ability to tie together, to relate to others outside oneself. Erikson thought that the perspective of an older person is based on a new definition of identity, which could be summarized in the sentence “I am what survives me.” If toward the end of life I conclude that nothing of myself is likely to survive, despair is likely to take over. But if I have identified with some more enduring entities, my survival will provide a sense of connection, of continuity, that keeps despair at bay. If I love my grandchildren, or the work I have accomplished, or the causes I have championed, then I am bound to feel a part of the future even after personal death. Jonas Salk calls this attitude “being a good ancestor.

It reminds me about Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when asked what the main aim of his life had been: ‘to be a good ancestor.’ A comment like that can only come from a man profoundly aware of his place in the universe.

Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,

Then, in 1955, the Salk vaccine was licensed. Porter watched in amazement and anger as several of his Christian Science classmates refused to get it. He thought of what the vaccine would have meant to his father’s life, and he cut his ties with the church. “That is not what I would call moral thinking,” he says. The polio vaccine’s success was profound. In 1952, the year Jonas Salk first began to test it in humans, the United States had 57,879 cases. By 1957, two years after the vaccine was approved for broad use, the number had fallen to 5,485, and by 1964 it was 122.

Jonas Salk lo dijo mejor cuando escribió: «He tenido sueños y he tenido pesadillas. Superé mis pesadillas gracias a mis sueños»

WHAT PEOPLE THINK OF AS THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY IS REALLY THE DISCOVERY OF THE QUESTION. Jonas Salk

In 1991 Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said: ‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge

The majority of what's happening at any given moment in the global economy can be tied back to a handful of past events that were nearly impossible to predict. The most common plot of economic history is the role of surprises. The reason surprises occur is not because our models are wrong, or our intelligence is low. It's because the odds that Adolf Hitler's parents argued on the evening nine months before he was born were the same as them conceiving a child. Technology is hard to predict, because Bill Gates may have died from Polio if Jonas Salk got cranky and gave up on his quest to find a vaccine. The reason we couldn't predict the student loan growth, is because an airport security guard may have confiscated a hijacker's knife on 9/11. That's all there is to it.

The reward for work done is the opportunity to do more. ​— ​Jonas Salk

Solutions come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. You don’t invent the answer—you reveal the answer. —Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk said it best when he wrote: ‘I have had dreams and I have had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

Jack Einhorn, the chief scientist at a New York media start-up called Inform Technologies, predicts that the great discoveries of the twenty-first century will come from finding patterns in vast archives of data. "The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician," he says, "not a doctor.

Throughout history, there have been people who mattered more. Some of them, like Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill and Jonas Salk, changed the course of history in grand strokes. Others, like Reuben Styrlund and Dora Salk, made a meaningful difference on a smaller stage...Remembered or not lived out in a small town or on the world's stage, the journey of relevance matters.

The person most responsible for developing a polio vaccine wasn’t Jonas Salk. Nor was it Karl Landsteiner or Simon Flexner or Carl Kling or any of the many researchers, public health officials, or epidemiologists who dedicated their careers to the study and prevention of polio. The person most responsible for eliminating polio from the United States—and later from most of the world—was a Wall Street lawyer named Basil O’Connor.

In the fall of 1951, on the thousand-foot, grandly appointed deck of the world’s most elegant luxury liner, the Queen Mary, Basil O’Connor met a man who seemed to be different from other scientists—Jonas Salk.

In 1943, while Jonas Salk was working on an influenza vaccine, there were ten thousand cases of polio in the United States; in 1948, when Salk was typing polio viruses, there were twenty-seven thousand cases of polio; in 1952, when Salk was first testing his ideas on how to make a polio vaccine, there were fifty-nine thousand cases of polio. Almost every American was directly or indirectly affected by this disease.

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It is my partner.”    —Jonas Salk

The day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90% effective, Jonas Salk refused to commercialize it or obtain a patent

A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child,” Epstein wrote. “Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.”14 The media reacted with unmitigated scorn and fury. Dr. Jill, they said, was not merely a doctor—she was the greatest doctor since Jonas Salk.

An army of scientists had been called to evaluate the trial of Jonas Salk's vaccine in American back in 1955. But to evaluate the design and execution of the hugest vaccine trial of all time, and the validity of the results, there was just her (Dorothy Horstmann). No pressure, whatsoever.

Not a direct quote, but referenced in the author's note at the end - Sister Elizabeth Kenny, was instrumental in developing a new method of treating polio. Barbara Johnson, a laboratory technician who was paralyzed with polio after a workplace accident but went on the work with Sabin as his statistician. Isabel Morgan vaccine successfully induced immunity in monkeys and was the basis of Jonas Salk's entry into the vaccine race. We'd be talking about the Morgan vaccine if she hadn't refused to test the vaccine on children. Elsie Ward perfected the technique for growing the virus outside a living body. Her technique allowed Salk's lab to make enough of the virus to put in the vaccines for millions of children. Whistleblower Bernice Eddy reported that test monkeys who got the vaccine from Cutter laboratories were developing polio, thus alerting officials that Cutter would be releasing unsafe vaccines for use. -- Her concerns were ignored and caused 200 children to acquire Polio through the vaccine. Many of the children were paralyzed. Some died. Federal regulations of vaccines was tightened because of this - and her. Eleanor Abbott invented the game Candy Land to amuse patients after she herself was hospitalized for the disease.

Jonas Salk said, ‘I have had dreams and I’ve had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams,

[Jonas] Salk never stopped trying to be of “some help to humankind.” In 1962 he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which he hoped would serve as “a cathedral to science.” The competition to work there was so steep that Salk joked, “I couldn’t possibly have become a member of this institute if I hadn’t founded it myself.”42 Salk continued to work until he died of heart failure in 1993. During the last years of his life he devoted his attention to finding a vaccine for AIDS. He said he knew that many people expected him to fail in his attempts, but he maintained, “There is no such thing as failure. You can only fail if you stop too soon.”43 He never did develop that vaccine, maybe simply because death stopped him. But he never gave up. And he never stopped believing in the fundamental capacity for goodness in people. “What is important is that we, Number one: Learn to live with each other,” he said in 1985. “Number two: Try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment … the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.” Sometimes, as we go about our lives, we’re angry, or other people are angry. We’re idiots, or they are. Maybe it seems a lot to expect that we can lift up our fellow man and bring out the best in everyone. But we’ve done it before. We can work miracles when we come together to help one another. Just look at how we all cured polio.

If only I had known how many of these dinners I'd have to address," he said at a California bar association event, "I would've developed some sort of vaccine against them

Jonas Salk (1914–1995), who was first to develop an effective vaccine against polio, argued, “We know only too well the uniqueness of paralytic poliomyelitis, among all of the infectious diseases; the unusual combination that exists here is the terror and tragedy inflicted to a degree that is out of all proportion to the frequency of attack.

The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. It effectively “killed” the poliovirus. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible. Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The first big batch of vaccine wasn’t properly made. Cutter Laboratories in California, one of the main producers of the vaccine, inoculated more than 200,000 children in 1955, and within days there were reports of paralysis. Within a month, the program was discontinued, and investigations revealed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

It seems to me now a shocking commentary on the press of our time that I pushed the hydrogen-bomb tests on Eniwetok right off the front pages. A tragic war was still raging in Korea, George VI had died and Britain had a new queen, sophisticated guided missiles were going off in New Mexico, Jonas Salk was working on a vaccine for infantile paralysis...Christine Jorgensen was on page one.

In 1950 Koprowski tested his vaccine on intellectually disabled children at Letchworth Village in Thiells, New York, an institution where “naked residents, unkempt and dirty, huddled in sterile dayrooms.”25 His use of people with mental disorders was not without precedent. During the war, under the sponsorship of the U.S. government, leading researchers had infected psychotic residents at an Illinois state hospital with malaria to test the effectiveness of experimental drugs.26 They had also tested trial influenza vaccines by requiring intellectually disabled people to breathe in influenza virus through aviation masks or to inhale a nebulized spray into their nostrils for four minutes; both vaccinated people and unvaccinated controls were forced to breathe in the virus.27 One of the leaders of these experiments was the young Jonas Salk.