A good companion book to Oshinsky’s “Polio – An American Story” that goes into great detail about the life and times of Jonas Salk, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) and Salk’s University of Pittsburg Lab that compounded the serum that led the way to a reliable and effective vaccine that can be administered under primitive conditions to wholly eradicate the disease of polio. The book is very detailed in its treatment of the tedious techniques of taming an explosive virus, and creating a recipe for large scale vaccine production, interwoven with the fascinating intense bitter personal and epidemical rivalry between Salk and Sabin. All this plays out to the background of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) who had the monumental task of raising the money and overseeing the work to say nothing of the human “trials” of the vaccine that would no longer be tolerated by our social, political or legal system.
