Karen Torgaly

They could relax a little bit and know that they didn't have to go through the summers preventing their children from going to swimming pools or places where they would get polio.

Now they were protected.

So Jonas Salk became sort of a celebrity scientist.

He was well-spoken and handsome and the press loved him and the public loved him.

And so Salk's vaccine was used for five full years before the Sabin vaccine was ready to be used and had been tested on people in Eastern Europe.

At the time, in the 1950s, there were huge polio epidemics in the USSR.

These epidemics were just wiping out many, many children and causing lots of paralysis in others.

So they found out about the Salk vaccine and that it was successful in the United States, and they were desperate to

to get something that would work for them.

And they decided to send their best virologists from the USSR to the United States to learn how to make the vaccines.

They also knew that Sabin was developing another kind of vaccine.

They wanted to learn about both.

So this scientist named Mikhail Chumakov and his wife, Marina Voroshilova, were two of the most famous scientists in Russia.

They came over with several other people and, of course, with the KGB watching them and our people watching everybody.

And they traveled from lab to lab to learn the techniques that they needed to know to develop a polio vaccine in the Soviet Union.

They really bonded with Sabin because Sabin remembered how to speak some Russian.

And he had that Eastern European experience.

And his personality and Chumakov's personality were very similar.

They both had these explosive tempers and were perfectionists and wouldn't put up with any nonsense.

They bonded and became good friends, and this lasted their whole lives.