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Fortunately, Salk had somehow found time to do basic research on the virus and write a few theoretical papers, and it was these that caught the eye of Basil O'Connor, the zealous head of the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, who decided to play a hunch and shove some dimes in Salk's direction with instructions to get going.
With that, the seeds of resentment, deep and abiding, were sown. By then, dozens of worthy researchers had been toiling far longer than Salk in the fields of polio and would have given their microscopes for such funding and freedom. Who was this hired gun who appeared from nowhere with a bankroll the size of a special prosecutor's, plus free use of all the backbreaking work that had gone before?
In fact, the key piece of research, available to all, was completed a few years earlier by the one undisputed hero of this story, Harvard's John Enders. It was his team that figured out how to grow polio in test tubes--suddenly giving vaccine hunters everywhere enough virus to work with.
Now the goal was truly in sight, and who got there first was largely a matter of speed--Salk's forte--and luck. "Salk was strictly a kitchen chemist," Sabin used to gripe. "He never had an original idea in his life." But imaginative people perennially underrate efficient ones, and at the time, the kitchen chemist--who prepared his vaccine by marinating the virus in formalin--was just what the doctor ordered.
Salk and Sabin came from the two competing schools of vaccine research. Sabin, like Louis Pasteur, believed the way to produce immunity was to create a mild infection with a "live" but crippled virus, and he concocted his competing vaccine accordingly. Salk, from his flu-fighting days, knew the immune system could be triggered without infection, using deactivated, or "killed," viruses. And, as it turned out, his quick-and-dirty killed viruses were better suited to a crash program than Sabin's carefully attenuated live ones. By 1954, Salk and Francis were ready to launch the largest medical experiment yet carried out in the U.S., vaccinating more than 1 million kids ages six to nine, some with the vaccine, some with a placebo. The children weren't told which they were getting.
The vaccine worked. But the world of science has a protocol for releasing such findings: first publish them in a medical journal, and then spread the credit as widely as possible. Salk took part in a press conference and went on radio but gave credit to nobody, including himself--of course, he was going to get the credit anyway. And that was the mistake that would haunt him.
Radio was right; vanity was wrong. This was not some breakthrough in carbuncle research but hot news that couldn't wait one more minute. Within the brotherhood of researchers, however, Salk had sinned unforgivably by not saluting either Enders or, more seriously, his colleagues at the Pittsburgh lab. Everything he did after that was taken as showboating--when he opened the Salk Institute, a superlab in La Jolla, Calif., for the world's scientists to retreat to and bask in, and even when not long before his death in 1995, he started a search for an AIDS vaccine, to a flourish of trumpets and welcome new funding.