When the Health News Frightens Them, Tell Them About Jonas Salk

Whenever an outbreak makes the news, my house gets a particular kind of quiet question at bedtime. Usually phrased as a fact rather than a worry, which I’ve learned is how twelve-year-olds ask about things that scare them.

Mister Rogers had the famous advice for this, and it’s famous because it works: look for the helpers. There are always helpers.

The trouble is you need an actual helper to point at. Here’s mine.

America in the 1950s was properly frightened

It’s difficult to picture now. Polio swept through American towns every summer. Pools shut. Cinemas emptied. Parents kept children indoors through the warmest weeks of the year, which tells you how afraid people were, because keeping a child indoors in July is not a small decision.

In 1952 alone nearly 58,000 Americans caught it, most of them children. Some never walked again. Some spent months in an iron lung, a machine that breathed for them.

Every parent in the country knew somebody.

A careful man in a modest lab

Jonas Salk wasn’t a celebrity scientist. He worked at a university in Pittsburgh, and his approach to a vaccine was one most senior experts thought wouldn’t work.

He spent years on it. Testing, failing, adjusting, testing again, working through weekends and holidays in a way his family clearly felt.

When it was ready for human trials, he gave it to himself first. Then his wife. Then his three sons, in the kitchen, before he asked a single other family to take the risk.

The 1955 results came back and it worked. Church bells rang. Strangers wept in the street. Within a few years, polio in the United States had dropped by more than ninety percent.

The answer that made him extraordinary

He was instantly the most famous scientist in America, and the thing he’d made was worth an amount of money that’s hard to write down. Modern estimates of the patent put it in the billions.

A journalist asked him live on television who owned the patent.

He said: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

He never filed one. He wanted the vaccine to move as fast and as cheaply as possible to as many children as possible, and he decided that mattered more than being rich, and then he simply went on with his work.

Why I reach for this story

A child who only hears frightening headlines learns that the world is dangerous and happening at them.

A child who hears this one learns something else, and it isn’t optimism exactly, it’s more like accuracy: when things break, people fix them. Some of those people are absurdly generous about it. And the fixers were, once, kids nobody had heard of.

Three things worth asking, if you tell it at dinner:

• Why do you think he tested it on his own family first?
• He could have been one of the richest people alive. Why didn’t he?
• What’s something you’d want to fix?

My son answered the last one with something about the state of the pool changing rooms, which is not what I was hoping for, but I’ve decided to take it.