Salk thought his colleagues were jealous. “If someone does something and gets credit for it, then
there is this tendency to have this competitive response,” he acknowledged in rare comments about
the incident. “I was not unscathed by Ann Arbor.” But Salk passed away in 1995 without ever
acknowledging the contributions of his colleagues. Ten years later, in 2005, the University of
Pittsburgh held an event to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the vaccine announcement. With
Youngner in attendance, Salk’s son, AIDS researcher Peter Salk, finally set the record straight. “It
was not the accomplishment of one man. It was the accomplishment of a dedicated and skilled team,”
Peter Salk said. “This was a collaborative effort.”
It appears that Jonas Salk made the same mistake as Frank Lloyd Wright: he saw himself as
independent rather than interdependent. Instead of earning the idiosyncrasy credits that George Meyer
attained, Salk was penalized by his colleagues for taking sole credit.
Why didn’t Salk ever credit the contributions of his colleagues to the development of the polio
vaccine? It’s possible that he was jealously guarding his own accomplishments, as a taker would
naturally do, but I believe there’s a more convincing answer: he didn’t feel they deserved credit. Why
would that be?
michael s
(Michael S)
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