Karen Torgaly

Sometimes it was giving them insect repellent, spraying the heck out of everything with EDT, and sometimes he would try to make a rudimentary vaccine against them.

And at that time, there was a new system where they could do research in a tent that was put close to the front lines.

It wasn't ideal.

They didn't have all the equipment they needed.

It was...

horrible conditions.

It was super hot and miserable, but that's where he wanted to be and chose to be.

Sabin was seven years older than Jonas Salk and had many different experiences that made him a better virologist than Salk.

By that time, Albert Sabin had five years of research that he did at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, which was a very elite group of scientists.

Jonas Salk at that time was not that long out of his residency.

But he had been commissioned to look into confirming that there were three strains of poliovirus that caused disease in humans.

It was kind of like the ditch digging of virus research because it was just a lot of reproducing the disease in monkeys and seeing which of the 196 strains actually did cause disease.

It just was a long process.

But in the process, they were at a lot of meetings together.

They would sit up long into the night talking about their ideas and things that they would do to possibly make a vaccine for polio and how they would do it.

and Sabin became a mentor to Salk, and they got along pretty well by all reports.

That began to change when Salk had decided, because he had made a vaccine during the war in Michigan with a guy named Tommy Francis,

for influenza.

And it was a killed virus vaccine, meaning that the virus was inactivated completely to the point where they didn't think it was possible for a person who got the vaccine with the viruses in it could get sick from them because they were dead.

And that's the type of vaccine he wanted to make.