Jonas Salk

Jonas Edward Salk , born the October 28th 1914 and deceased the June 23rd 1995, was a American biologist , and the inventor of the Vaccin against the Poliomyélite.

Biography

Jonas Salk was born with New York, wire of Polish immigrants. It made its studies of Médecine to the Université of Michigan, under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Francis, distinguished virologist. It was financially constant by the American army, which had urged it to develop a vaccine against the Grippe for the combatants of the Second world war. After these first successes, Salk establishes its personal laboratory with the Université of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, where he became professor. Little time afterwards, the Infantile Paralysis Foundation offered to him a very generous purse for its research, and he discovered an effective vaccine in 1954. After having tested more than one million children, the vaccine was declared effective in 1955. After this success, it opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies with La Jolla, in California which remains one of the greatest research centres medical in the world. Towards the end of its career, it was dedicated in the search of a vaccine against the AIDS, but died in 1995.

In 1969, Jonas Salk in La Jolla met, via mutual friends Francoise Gilot, a painter having lived several years with Pablo Picasso (of which it had two children: Claude Picasso and Paloma Picasso). They married in 1970 in Paris and lived together until the death of Salk.

The vaccine Salk

The vaccine known as Salk was one of the first effective vaccines for the immunization against a Virus in general. It was essential in the worldwide campaign for éradiquer the polio formerly one of the disease more the meutrières, especially in the children. The vaccine Salk functions on the principle of the weakened virus. I.e. Salk injects a weakened form, or inoffensive, virus of the polio to the patient, allowing the human body to develop an immunity against this one without to fall seriously sick. Immunized against the weakened form, the body is consequently also immunized against the more virulent form of the same virus. It should be noted that in 1961, Albert Sabin will develop a vaccine administrable by oral way conceived starting from a weakened form of the virus.

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Genealogy

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