Jonas Salk: Developed the polio vaccine and then declined to patent it. When asked why, he answered: "Could you patent the sun?"
Let's first appreciate how awful this disease really was, and how absolutely terrified people were.
A quote from A Paralyzing Fear:
It was the robber of hope for a generation, several generations of children. There were diseases, and scientists will chart them, that were more devastating, affecting more children, more deadly than polio. But polio left kids crippled, and that was an image that this big strong postwar country simply couldn't abide. We had children lining up in wheelchairs, in iron lungs, whose very vitality and everyone's hope for their future was allayed right at the most critical time in their childhoods. And that's why polio seemed like such a horrible scourge, far more so than any number of other diseases or accidents that, any way you want to measure it, were more deadly and were fatal. And the image of a child in an iron lung is about as tearful and wrenching as we could imagine at that time, and any time certainly in this century. There were many other diseases that were bad for America, but polio broke its heart.
And another one:
Maybe two or three hours after a lot of these kids would come in with a stiff neck or a fever, they'd be dead. It was unbelievable. It was just loads of people that came in, sometimes with only a fever but usually a headache and a little stiffness in the neck. And just absolutely terrified. At the height of the epidemic, the people in Minneapolis were so frightened that there was nobody in the restaurants. There was practically no traffic, the stores were empty. It just was considered a feat of bravado almost to go out and mingle in public. A lot of people just took up and moved away, went to another city.
It started early in the 1900s with small localised paralytic polio epidemics in Europe and North America. But, in the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.
Jonas Salk worked tirelessly for years, despite several unfavourable results. At one point he nearly gave up:
"But as he was sitting in a park and watching children play, he realized how important his work was. He saw that there were thousands of children and adults who would never walk again and whose bodies would be paralyzed. He realized his awesome responsibility, and so he continued his task with renewed vigor."
On April 12, 1955, the University of Michigan"declared the vaccine to be safe and effective."
That's Salk administering the vaccine to a young girl.
"The presentation was numbing, but the results were clear: the vaccine worked. Inside the auditorium Americans tearfully and joyfully embraced the results. By the time Thomas Francis stepped down from the podium, church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: 'Thank you, Dr. Salk.' 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled."
During a TV interview, the interviewer asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "No one. Could you patent the sun?" By not patenting the vaccine, he made it easily available and accessible for millions of children all over the world, effectively ending the endemic. By 1957, there were hardly any new cases of polio in the USA and by 2003, polio had been eradicated in almost all over the world. India was declared polio free by 2014.
The vaccine, if it had been patented, would have been worth $7 billion. If that isn't humanity, I don't know what is.
Read other answers by Rupal Sonawane on Quora:
- What are some shallow things that Indians do?
- How is school life in different countries?
- Who is your favourite Harry Potter character? And why?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2bHppxC
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