he could know that he did something extremely important for humanity, not for huge profits. That's a priceless bit of knowledge. We all die, and if we're lucky, we get to reflect back on our lives before that happens. For Jonas Salk, that reflection had to have been a good one.

I wonder about some others in our mercantile society and what they will see in that reflection. Mirror, Mirror...

From Louis Marshall "Grampa" Jones:

"To your grave there's no use taking any gold,
You cannot use it when it's time for hands to fold.
When you leave this earth for a better home someday,
The only thing you take is what you gave away."

The wealth he had was worth more than all the money in the world.
Thank you, Dr Salk

He counts it as one of the greatest highlights of his life.

No one suggested the man was, or should have been, "hurting for money." The point is, in contrast to the way so many in our society today are driven by sheer profit motive, here was a man who stood to profit beyond his wildest dreams as a result of his discovery, and yet chose not to do so. That is, or should be, commendable by any standard.

It seems pretty shallow to me.

. . . I just don't understand what your point was. (And it wasn't a snark, btw -- it was a straightforward response.) Why is it relevant to the discussion whether Dr. Salk was financially well off or not? (I mean, aren't most doctors?)

...over the top. I'm not sure who would have owned the IP rights - He was working for UOP at the time, and I'm pretty sure the university would have wanted a piece of the action.

Dr. Salk was paid handsomely for the excellent work he did. He had one of the better lots overlooking the ocean near the UCSD campus. Ownership of property on his street was limited to Big Science people. A lot of famous names are still on mailboxes on that block.

Link?

I'm challenging it.

...kids would go trick-or-treating at his house. It was a friendly home.

HTH

ETA I cannot post a link showing where someone lives, or lived, because doing so would violate the Terms of Service.

If you have access to a public record search for real property, I'll just say that the home is still in Dr. Salk's family.

. . . I wonder if, in 1955, institutions were yet routinely claiming IP ownership of their employees' work. Is anybody here familiar with the history IP laws?

Did you forget what you had said? It's just above the post you replied to.

I can't see why you're so annoyed with DUers, and I can't see why you're enjoying being so annoying.

I don't know why you find that annoying.

Seeing as you attacked a DUer in it.

daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and future generations and I thank you too.

One is in a wheelchair but gets around well, the other walks with an affected gait.

I just turned 55. The two people mentioned above are just a few years older.

I'm 65 and remember it well, from photos in LIFE magazine and from the terror of the adults. When I was in K-12 every school had a couple of survivors in heavy leg braces and crutches. Not everyone survived. Kids in wheelchairs weren't in regular public school because there were no accommodations for their needs. Kids in iron lungs were in hospital wards.

To this day I have no idea if the first shots that my sibs and I had were low-cost or free as a public health measure, but I do remember that the clinic was held at a classroom in my elementary school in the evening and the lines stretched out along the playground as parents brought their children to be vaccinated. My little sister was about 4 and screeched like the devil, but there was no way my parents would have "spared her the pain" of the needle, any more than they would have "spared us the scar" of our smallpox vaccinations.

The current vaccination wars are proof that we don't teach anything about public health in school in any of the classes where a kid could learn how important this subject is: History, Science, Health, Civics, English (novels are replete with relevant stories)...

too stubborn to die and our grandchildren tell her they are grateful for that. Thanks, slackmaster.

you ****

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2983887&mesg_id=2983923

Please read the entire article at the above link.

For SV40 Simian virus see here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40

There's something surreal about your making the link between the research of Dr. Salk and this -- I don't know your history, but do you always make this kind of leap?


the OP at your link says:

Investigative Report: U.S. ships unsafe products

Source: The Sacramento Bee

Ten days ago, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced another in a series of well-publicized recalls of Chinese-made goods: children's art sets containing crayons, markers, pastels, pencils, water colors -- and lead -- distributed by Toys "R" Us.
. . .
But 13 months earlier, in July 2006, the CPSC, without a press release or corresponding media attention, authorized a Los Angeles company to export to Venezuela 16,520 art sets that violated the same CPSC standard protecting children from dangerous art supplies. The following month, the agency authorized a Miami company to export to Jamaica 5,184 sets of wax crayons that also violated the standard.
. . .
Using the CPSC's database of exports of non-approved products and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act, The Bee found that between October 1993 and September 2006, the CPSC received 1,031 requests from companies to export products the agency had found unsafe for American consumers. The CPSC approved 991 of those requests, or 96 percent.

Agency spokesman Scott Wolfson said the CPSC is simply following export notification law "as Congress spelled it out for us." But CPSC Commissioner Thomas Moore strongly objected to the policy.

"Our agency, through our governing statues, cannot claim much moral superiority over the Chinese, or any other foreign country, when it comes to our own export policy," Moore said in a list of his legislative proposals submitted to Congress in July. "Our export policy is based on a desire to see U.S. manufacturers be able to compete in foreign countries in terms of price and marketability, not safety.

The link in my original post on DU2 went here : http://www.laleva.cc/choice/vaccines/vaccines_whyNOT.html

extract here :

On July 6, 1960, concerned that a monkey virus might be contaminating the polio vaccine, Eddy took her findings to Dr. Joseph Smadel, chief of the NIH's biologics division. Smadel dismissed the tumors as harmless "lumps."

The same year, however, at a Merck laboratory in Pennsylvania, Dr. Maurice Hilleman and Dr. Ben Sweet isolated the virus. They called it simian virus 40, or SV40, because it was the 40th virus found in rhesus kidney tissue. Immunization campaign, 1961 By then, the nation was winning the war against polio. Nearly 98 million Americans - more than 60 percent of the population - had received at least one injection of the Salk vaccine, and the number of cases was plummeting. At the same time, an oral polio vaccine developed by virologist Albert Sabin was in final trials in Russia and Eastern Europe, where tens of millions had been inoculated, and it was about to be licensed in the United States. Unlike the Salk vaccine, the oral version contained a live but weakened form of polio virus and promised lifelong immunity.

But U.S. Public Health Service officials were worried. Tests had found SV40 in both the Sabin and Salk vaccines - it was later estimated that as much as a third of the Salk vaccine was tainted - and that SV40 was causing cancer in lab animals.

In early 1961, they quietly met with the agency's top vaccine advisers. The agency found no evidence that the virus had been harmful to humans, but in March, the officials ordered manufacturers to eliminate SV40 from all future vaccine.

>

The first public disclosure that the Salk vaccine was contaminated came in the New York Times on July 26, 1961. A story on Page 33 reported that Merck and other manufacturers had halted production until they could get a "monkey virus" out of the vaccine.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Salk had used live monkey virus. What that article doesn't mention is that having discovered the stocks of vaccine were seriously flawed they were not destroyed - the US exported them to the UK for re-export to Africa. Had you had the documentaries we've had in the UK on the subject over the years you would already be aware of this but chances they were ever shown in the USA are nil.

Incidence of the tumours has shown those at most risk are the children , and their children , of those who had the vaccine pre - 1961 which includes those in the USA.

Original here http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Rogue-virus-in-the-vaccine-Early-polio-vaccine-2899957.php

If you consider the San Francisco Chronicle to be a conspiracy site then do please tell them.

expect a facepalm.

and it was just a convenient to serious subject of which I was already aware. I found the original SF one now.

I personally am not in the least bit anti vaccination : I'm even uptodate with tetanus and hep A.

Which speaks volumes about the people who champion it.

i assume he was well off but so are many corporate whores like Romney and that doesn't stop them from being more greedy.

They will have left nothing that benefits mankind. Nothing.

and they loved learning about him. Several of them wrote about him when they were assigned to write about their heroes. After summer break, one boy came running up to me to tell me what he had learned and read about Dr. Salk during the summer. And we did touch on the fact that he refused a profit.

In 1941, at the University of Michigan, doctors Francis and Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages.[17] Francis Rous, editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:

"It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper ... elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes without saying."[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States

Dr. Salk's vaccine was administered by injection...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

Some of the crap I see on DU is appalling, whether it's driven by anti-vax lunacy or, er.... certain other fucked up mindsets.

cough.