Jonas Salk was born in New York City. He studied medicine at New York University where he worked on a vaccine for influenza with the noted microbiologist Thomas Francis. Following medical school, he worked as a researcher in virology at the University of Michigan, and in 1947 became head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Salk is remembered for the development of the killed-virus vaccine for poliomyelitis in 1953. The vaccine was tested in two massive field trials in 1954.
After the success of the field trials, Salk was at once lionized by the public but criticized by other scientists who felt that he had rushed the research for personal glory. Within a few years, the Salk vaccine had been replaced by the oral, live-strain (attenuated) vaccine developed by Albert Sabin. In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California. Salk died of heart failure in 1995.
Because the 1954 field trials for the Salk vaccine involved two separate statistical experiments, the data have been studied by students of statistics ever since.