Jonas Salk: A Life.By Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs.Oxford University Press; 559 pages; $34.95 and £22.99.
THE 1910s were not always kind to New York. In mid-1916 the city faced a polio epidemic that killed a baby every 2½ hours. Hospitals were full, and paralysis would leave many survivors in wheelchairs, on crutches or bedridden for life. Two years later a vicious form of influenza killed over 33,000 New Yorkers and 20m worldwide.
Jonas Salk, born in 1914 in a tenement in the city, was spared. In her biography of the man who developed the first polio vaccine and played a major role in developing the first flu vaccine, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, a professor emerita of medicine at Stanford University, weaves together intimate and historical details. She paints a picture of a sensitive, genuinely kind idealist who pursued what he thought was right with gentle but unrelenting tenacity.
The first half is a fascinating—and at times nauseating—tour of vaccine-making’s past: myriad monkeys sacrificed gruesomely on the altar of science; zealous researchers drinking minced rat brain teeming with polio to prove the...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Nk6Ac8
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