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That America's greatest hero was for a time a man in a white lab coat might have delighted Salk's peers in medical research. Instead many of them resented him as a man who reaped the glory for work that had been pioneered by less celebrated scientists all around the world. By 1962 Dr. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, derived from live viruses, had become the preferred method of inoculation in the U.S., and Sabin was bitter about Salk's earlier triumph. Just a few years before his own death in 1993 Sabin claimed that "Salk didn't discover anything." Salk himself was often uncomfortable with the fuss made over him. He made a point of crediting others and tried to discourage use of the term "Salk vaccine."
In 1963 Salk was able to realize a lifelong dream when he became director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at a magnificent compound designed by Louis Kahn, on an oceanfront promontory in La Jolla, California. It attracted scientists in many fields to pursue biomedical research. In 1970, two years after divorcing his first wife, Salk married Francoise Gilot, the onetime companion and muse of Pablo Picasso and mother of two of Picasso's children.
When a new epidemic emerged in the 1980s, AIDS, Salk plunged into the effort to find a vaccine that would prevent people who are already infected with HIV from progressing to the full-blown disease. Though many scientists remain skeptical of Salk's approach, small-scale tests are under way.
But the greatest pleasure of Salk's later life, which he pursued in several books and in countless luncheon conversations at his institute, was to reflect on the large questions of human evolution and people's roles as "co-authors" with nature in their destiny--such as, for instance, his own. "I could have studied the immunological properties of, say, the tobacco mosaic virus,'' he once reflected, "published my findings, and they would have been of some interest. But the fact that I chose to work on the polio virus, which brought control of a dreaded disease, made all the difference.'' All the difference for him. And for hundreds of thousands of others too.
--With reporting by Paul Krueger/San Diego