Jonas Salk was home with his wife, but she could tell his mind was elsewhere—back in his lab, where work was proceeding apace on what would become the first vaccine against polio. “Why Jonas,” said Donna Salk, according to TIME’s March 29, 1954, cover story, “you’re not listening to me at all.”
“My dear,” he was said to have joked, “I’m giving you my undevoted attention.”
That Jonas Salk’s devotions lay elsewhere was well known to his intimates. They lay in the battle against polio—a disease that had killed or paralyzed more than 52,000 American boys and girls in a single summer just two years earlier. They lay in his yearslong effort to develop a vaccine against the disease. And they lay too in the great field trial that…
