Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914, in
New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Jewish; Daniel was born in
New Jersey to immigrant parents while Dora was born in
Minsk and emigrated to the United States when she was 12. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. He had two younger brothers, Herman and
Lee, a
child psychologist. The family moved from
East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place in
the Bronx, with some time spent in
Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street,
Arverne. At age 13, Salk entered
Townsend Harris Hall Prep School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of
City College of New York (CCNY), it was "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school", according to David Oshinsky, his biographer. In high school, "he was known as a perfectionist...who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." However, of the students who graduated, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, then noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education Salk enrolled in CCNY, where he earned a
Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth." "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school After graduating from City College of New York, Salk enrolled in
New York University School of Medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as
Walter Reed, who helped conquer
yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews...while most of the surrounding medical schools—
Cornell,
Columbia,
University of Pennsylvania, and
Yale—had rigid
quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. In his last year of medical school, Salk said, "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the
Thomas Francis' laboratory at the
University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the
Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B
influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of
virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious
Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine. ==Polio research==