Polio Quotes (7 quotes)
Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.
J. R. Wilson, Margin of Safety (1963), 98.
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. ... Choose science.
The Demon-Haunted World (1996), 30.
My two Jamaican cousins … were studying engineering. “That’s where the money is,” Mom advised. … I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math. … Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk … and eight Nobel Prize winners. … In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Explaining his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career, in My American Journey (1996), 23-26. ROTC is the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) school-based program of the U.S. military. From there, the self-described “C-average student out of middling Morris High School” went on to become a four-star general.
The century of biology upon which we are now well embarked is no matter of trivialities. It is a movement of really heroic dimensions, one of the great episodes in man’s intellectual history. The scientists who are carrying the movement forward talk in terms of nucleo-proteins, of ultracentrifuges, of biochemical genetics, of electrophoresis, of the electron microscope, of molecular morphology, of radioactive isotopes. But do not be misled by these horrendous terms, and above all do not be fooled into thinking this is mere gadgetry. This is the dependable way to seek a solution of the cancer and polio problems, the problems of rheumatism and of the heart. This is the knowledge on which we must base our solution of the population and food problems. This is the understanding of life.
Letter to H. M. H. Carsan (17 Jun 1949). Quoted in Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (1952), 166.
Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
[On being asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine by journalist, Edward R. Murrow in 1954.]
[On being asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine by journalist, Edward R. Murrow in 1954.]
Quoted in The Economist (14 Aug 1999), 11. In Howard Gardner, et al., Good Work (2002), 111.
When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. Experiments were done to determine what might or might not occur. I guided each one by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm is constantly active—the realm of imagination guides my thinking.
From interview with James Reston, Jr., in Pamela Weintraub (ed.), The Omni Interviews (1984), 98. Previously published in magazine, Omni (May 1982).
When you inoculate children with polio vaccine, you don’t sleep well for two or three months.
As quoted without citation in Greer Williams, Virus Hunters (1959), 289. Webmaster found on the web that, allegedly, the quote is as told to reporters (11 Oct 1954) and reported for the Associated Press from Pittsburgh by Saul Pett—but Webmaster has not found such a print story for verification. The quote appears widely duplicated and circulated, but none found have a citation to a primary print source. Some specify weeks, others say months. Please contact Webmaster if you have a definitive reference to a newspaper article.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
