Dr. Peter Salk



TORGHELE: It is May 16, 2017. We are at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and I am here with Dr. Peter Salk, who is a physician in La Jolla, California, and president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation. Welcome, Dr. Salk.

SALK: Thank you.

TORGHELE: I am Karen Torghele, and I'm going to be interviewing Dr. Salk for the Global Health Chronicles Oral History of Polio Project. So to begin with, Dr. Salk, would you please tell us about your background and a little bit about what your childhood was like?

SALK: OK, I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan--and I'll rewind at some point to put that in the context of my parents' life--lived there for three and a half years, born in 1944. In 1947, we moved into, basically, the country outside of 00:01:00Pittsburgh, in a village called Wexford. That was '47. Then in 1953, moved into Pittsburgh. I guess in a sense I'm pausing because all of this is intertwined with my father, his history, and the work that he did. I'd be tempted to put it in that perspective, but to just continue the arc of it, so that there's a sense of the connection from the beginning to the end--when I was nineteen in 1963, the family then moved here to La Jolla, California--and I'll fill in those gaps and the reasons for that. I was in college at the time, spent some time here during that period. Went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins [University], where--I was at Harvard [University] for undergraduate school, Johns Hopkins for medical school. Went to Cleveland for two years of house staff training in 00:02:00internal medicine. Met my wife there. We moved here to California in 1971 because I wanted to be working with my father. I've been here in San Diego ever since. I did work with my father in his laboratory until he closed his lab at the age of seventy in 1984. Did some other things, which I either can't or won't need to say anything about. Worked with him again at the end of his life, for the last four and a half-odd years of his life on an AIDS [acquired immunodeficiency syndrome] vaccine project he was undertaking. After he died in 1995, continued some work in that area. Branched out to some work on introduction of AIDS treatment programs primarily in Africa, also Asia. And for the last--it's been more than a decade now, have been focused primarily on my 00:03:00father's life, his history, his legacy, on working with the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation. A small organization still at this point, on some of the historical materials related to my father's life, educating the public and undertaking some more outward-looking programs that stem from the kinds of interests that my father had in one way or another. So that's a little bit of the arc of the life where I am up to this point. I'm seventy-three now. My wife and I have one son, Michael, who is thirty-four, married, living in Paris, doing public health work in relation to--with the University of Maryland, the Institute of Human Virology. That's the general arc, but there's plenty of details to fill in and 00:04:00have it intercalate with things that relate to my father and things that don't relate. Does that give you a beginning? TORGHELE: That's kind of an outline. That sounds good. SALK: OK. So I'd be tempted, depending on whether that would work for you--it's just a way of providing some orientation to give a sense--I mean, I know that's not really what you have down in the list of things, but it might provide a bit of a skeleton if I were to say a little bit about my father and his life development and interest. And that will provide some intersection with what I've said, and I think there can be a number of different branching points. But if it's OK with you, I'd be tempted to take that as an orienting thread to get a sense of more substance. Would that be OK as far as you're 00:05:00concerned? TORGHELE: So do you want me to start with the question about--you were just saying you were the oldest of Jonas Salk's three sons. And would you tell us about your father's life and how he grew up, to start with, and about him, and then we'll talk about your life and then some of the more specific questions? SALK: I think that will work well. So my father was born in 1914 in New York City. His mother had come over with her family from Minsk in Belarus when--I don't remember how old she was, whether she was six when she came over or may have been older. She went to work quite young in the garment industry, 00:06:00was a very determined woman. Became a supervisor at the age of sixteen. His father's parents had come over to the United States from Lithuania. My father had two younger brothers, [Dr. Herman M. Salk] Herman and [Dr. Lee Salk] Lee. They grew up primarily in the Bronx--was born in Manhattan, the family moved to the Bronx. My father attended the local public elementary school--I don't remember which PS--public school--it was--and then went to Townsend Harris for high school. I think it was a school for gifted children and there was a rather accelerated program. He graduated from high school at the age, if I'm not mistaken, of fifteen, entered city college of New York. His family was a Jewish 00:07:00family, and they were quite observant. Whether they were Orthodox, I'm not sure, but religion was a strong feature of his growing up. But that changed when he went to City College [City College of New York]. He had an opportunity to take a chemistry course. He'd initially thought that he would become a lawyer and get elected to Congress and help make laws that would improve people's lives. He was committed from early on, from his youngest years to doing something to help humanity. That was his focus, that was his orientation, and that's what drove him. When he chose to take the chemistry course, that was a turning point in his life, because the course met on Saturday, which was the Jewish Sabbath, and that 00:08:00was not compatible. But he made the decision to take the course, and that was the point at which he broke himself from the ongoing religious observances and practices. Being Jewish always was important to him in his life, but it was no longer in the sense of being a practicing Jew. The chemistry course changed his life entirely. He was smitten by the methodologies of science, by the aims of science, by the way of thinking. It was at that point that he made the decision that he would--well, it stemmed from that, that he made the decision to go to medical school, with the idea in mind, not of becoming a practicing 00:09:00physician--as good as he was at clinical work--but he wanted to go into research, where he would be able to make an impact that could be more widely felt. So after City College, he entered medical school at New York University School of Medicine. I think it took him five years to graduate because he had an opportunity--I think it was in his second year, I'm not 100% sure--to take a year off from the ordinary medical training and to work with [Dr.] R. Keith Cannan, who was a professor of chemistry, I believe, on--I don't know exactly what projects that he was working on, but there was some research he was undertaking, and at the same time to engage as a mentor or assistant teacher for other students.

He also, while he was in medical school-- OK, I'm going to tell a little story 00:10:00about one experience that was seminal for him. During the microbiology course, the instructor in one of the lessons told the class that there were a couple of bacterial diseases--this would be diphtheria and tetanus--for which it was possible to create vaccines based on--the pathology in those diseases were caused by the toxins that the bacteria elaborated. You could take the toxins chemically, inactivate them, and use those as vaccines to prevent the deleterious consequences of infection with those organisms. Then in the next lesson, the professor told the students that when it came to diseases caused by 00:11:00viruses, you couldn't do that. You couldn't kill or inactivate a virus. You needed--in order to induce protective immunity, you needed to have the experience of the infection itself caused by the live virus. My father just didn't understand why that should be the case. He asked the professor, and the answer was basically, "Well, just because." So this was the dogma that prevailed at that time, that to immunize against a viral illness, you needed to have a live virus vaccine. So that set my father off on the major course of his life, because he felt, himself, both those statements can't be true. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to use the same principle to create a vaccine against a viral illness. He had the opportunity while in medical school to work with one 00:12:00of the--I'm assuming he was a professor there, but I'm not actually sure--[Dr.] Thomas Francis, Jr., who will figure later on in the story as well. Dr. Francis was interested in the same thing: Can you make a vaccine against a viral illness? In this case, he was working with influenza using an inactivated virus. So my father had the experience of working with Dr. Francis at NYU, then finished his medical school training, went on and completed--then, what was called an internship was a two-year program--at Mt. Sinai Hospital, following which he then needed to make a decision about where to go next. There were 00:13:00always difficulties to be overcome at that point, being Jewish, in terms of quotas and limitations and programs that one might be accepted into, and he ended up seeking a position with Dr. Francis, who had by that point moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was, I believe, a professor of epidemiology. My father married my mother, whose name was Donna Lindsay. She was a very bright, attractive, witty, talented woman, who, as far as my father's mother was concerned, didn't look Jewish. She was Jewish, but she didn't pass the smell test or whatever, you know, so that was always an issue of sorts. Her 00:14:00father [Dr. Elmer Lindsay] was a dentist who took care of many prominent people in New York City, including--I don't know how many viewers will remember the Philip Morris cigarette advertisements. There was a bellboy who was--I'm not going to try and imitate the style of his voice, but "call for Philip Mo-rraaa-iss." Anyway, so he was one my grandfather's patients. His [Elmer's] father had come from Hungary. My mother's mother died while my mother was still rather young--I think still in college--of colon cancer. I think that was a hard experience for my mother. My father was--I don't know what to say--I'm not sure 00:15:00that shy is the right word, but he was quite limited in a sense because his mother ruled him with an iron hand. He was the oldest of three children, and he was, in a sense, the substitute father in the family. His mother, Dora [Salk], whose children ultimately ended up referring to her as "the duchess"--his father was a much milder--Dan--was a much milder man--also worked in the garment industry, designed lace--and I don't know what the Jewish expression is for golden hands, but that was an expression that was applied to him--a very different sort of person. One of the stories about my grandmother and my father was that he wasn't allowed as a child to read books that had pictures in them, 00:16:00because she didn't regard those as being serious enough. So he was very studious perforce. He did not have much of an opportunity to engage socially, dating, and so forth. That wasn't on the top of list of things that were part of his life. I'm not sure even that I fully understand the significance of this, but kids at that age, up to a certain age, wore knickerbockers, which were not full-length pants. And if I'm remembering correctly, he had an extended period of having to wear knickerbockers. Anyway, so she was a dominant force in his life. OK, so now I know where I went off on that little diversion, which--I had said that my 00:17:00mother and father had gotten married. They got married, I think, June 9--I may be off by a couple days now--1939. I think it was the day after he graduated from medical school. Reason being that my mother's father, Elmer [Lindsay], wanted to have an M.D. on the name of his daughter's--Donna's--spouse. Not only that, my mother had one younger sister, Margot [Lindsay]. Not only did my father need to have an M.D. at the end of his name on the wedding invitation, but he needed to have a middle initial because he was just Jonas Salk. So Edward was chosen. I don't know whether that was Elmer or Donna, whoever chose that, but 00:18:00then it was Jonas Edward Salk or Jonas E. Salk. And that stuck with him for many years, until finally in the later years of his life he dropped his middle name and went back to just Jonas Salk as he had been. So Jonas and Donna went off to Michigan. This was an interesting--something that was going on for my father because his choice was that when they got to Ann Arbor, they moved into the second floor of a farmhouse. It was owned by the Craigs. My mother was not comfortable with that. She was a city girl. But my father wanted that aspect of experience in his life. I don't really know what drove him, but I can feel it. I mean, there's something, I think, on a spiritual level, that just wanted to have a different experience in nature. So I remember that house. I was born not in 00:19:00the house, but that was where we were living when I was born in--I don't know what the name of the hospital was in Ann Arbor where babies were born, but that will figure in a little bit later in the story. I won't go into the specifics of early memories there, but I'm going to guess I may have been around two when we moved to the Pretz house. It was then their own house. What else to say there? My brother Darrell--I will probably, if I refer to him further in this interview, I will use the name we always called him, which was Darry, D-A-R-R-Y. 00:20:00I think Darrell prefers to go by Darrell, but I will most likely lapse into the familiar for me. So Darry was born while we were still in Ann Arbor. My father then had worked with Tommy Francis and whoever other the coworkers were engaged in this project, to develop an inactivated vaccine against influenza. My father--I don't really know intimately all of the history and the ins and outs of the research, but my father had a major role to play in that program. They were successful. The vaccine was developed, tested, worked. This was work funded by the Army. I won't get this right now, I'm sure, but perhaps it was World War I that--so what I'm about to say may be completely wrong, but what I retain 00:21:00inside somewhere is that influenza killed more soldiers, let's say, in World War I than did hostilities. So this is a big deal for the Army, and the vaccine was introduced at the end of World War II. My father continued, and always had his own way of approaching his work. He didn't like to do things the way things were prescribed if it didn't make sense to him. From his point of view, a better way of going about doing things--and again, if I'm not mistaken, it was Dr. Francis at one point who said to my father, while working in the lab, setting in Ann Arbor, "Damn it, Salk, why can't you do things the way everybody else does?" You've probably seen this in the Shot [The Shot Felt 'Round the World] film that 00:22:00I referred you to, my brother Jonathan [Salk] saying that he just couldn't. This wasn't his nature. So my father was restive, wanted to have more freedom. And so the flu vaccine was introduced in 1945. In 1947, my father was seeking a position elsewhere so he could have independence. Ended up going to the University of Pittsburgh to head up a new virus research laboratory. Went there with the intention of continuing work on influenza. One of the aspects of the work that he had been engaged in was looking at the use of adjuvants--in particular mineral oil as an adjuvant, incomplete Freund's adjuvant--to increase the potency of the vaccine, which could mean lowering the amount of antigen that was used, having broader reactivity and cross-reactivity among strains. So that 00:23:00was his intention on going to Pittsburgh. But very soon after arriving--and I'll rewind to put the geographical situation together in a moment--he had a visit from [Dr.] Harry [M.] Weaver, who was the director of research for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis--fundraising arm March of Dimes, later became known as the March of Dimes--asking my father if he would be willing to take part in a collaborative program. So the couple of branching points there--my father was set up in a laboratory in Municipal Hospital, which was the 00:24:00infectious disease hospital in Pittsburgh working in the medical school at the university. As I understand it, his initial laboratory facilities were essentially nonexistent. It was in the morgue in the basement of the hospital. I don't really have a complete grasp of what his life was like in those first weeks and months, but with the opportunity to take part in this so-called typing program--and I guess that was about where we broke before--that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was interested in undertaking. That gave him--by agreeing to that that provided the opportunity to build out a 00:25:00laboratory, acquire staff, undertake a program that many people would not have found intrinsically interesting. What was the issue was that it was known that there were at least three immunologic types of poliovirus: type 1, type 2, and type 3. What wasn't known was, were there more? Were there 4, 5, 6? And it was necessary to know that in order to construct a vaccine that would cover all of the types of polio because you needed to do that if you wanted to ultimately protect against the disease in its entirety. So that program was undertaken. There were, I believe, four centers around the country that were involved in the program. My father, early on, ran afoul of [Dr.] Albert Sabin in that Sabin was 00:26:00older, well-established, well-respected, and whether he was in charge of the typing program or whether he took charge--I'm elaborating a little bit here--he certainly was a dominant force in the design and implementation of how that program would be carried out. My father, along with--I remember the man's name--he was the dean of the medical school of Johns Hopkins, [Dr. Thomas B.] Tommy Turner--I think that was it if I'm correct--was the person who gave a voice to this during the meeting. And my father chimed in, which was basically--and I will go for another however many years I live and will never 00:27:00fully get the story right--which is that it was the virologists who had designed the typing program, the people who were interested in viruses for their own sake. And the way that the program was going to be designed--and forgive me if I don't have this quite exactly correct--was to take the unknown viruses and characterize them. Determine--titrate them to determine how much virus was needed to cause an infection in monkeys. So you would fully characterize the unknown virus and then determine its immunological type by--perhaps what it was, was to infect monkeys with a known type 1 or type 2 or type 3. Then challenge 00:28:00the monkeys after, if they survive the infection--challenge them with the unknown virus that had now been fully characterized, so he knew what dose to use, et cetera, which was a lot of work. My father and Tommy Turner--if I have this bit of the story correctly--saw it the other way around. Why don't do this--turn it around backwards, infect monkeys with a large dose of an unknown virus, then if it doesn't matter, you don't have to characterize it and titrate it and determine all its ins and outs, just infect monkeys with the large dose of virus. If they survive, then you can go back and challenge them with the well-characterized standard type 1 or type 2 or type 3, and in that way determine what the type of the unknown strain was. Well, the story is well documented in a book that I've mentioned to you, the Richard Carter book called 00:29:00Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk. And the interaction between my father and Dr. Sabin, who did not treat my father very politely in that context and treated him as an upstart--and I can't even remember exactly what prompted this--but basically said to my father, "Dr. Salk, you should know better than to say something like that." So my father very quickly had his fingers slapped with the ruler and got the notion of, I have to behave in a particular way if I'm going to succeed and interact successfully with this group of people. He had had training as a child, however, in how to deal with domineering people, in the form of his mother, so he already had ways of behaving imprinted upon him that led him to be able to get to where he wanted to go. But through a roundabout 00:30:00route rather than confronting directly--if there was opposition in front of him, to find ways around the opposition. So that early training, so to speak, ultimately served him well in that regard. So I think what I'm going to do is stick for a moment with the scientific, and then go back and fill in a little bit on the more personal home life, et cetera, but, again, just give a little bit of the skeleton outlines. So the other feature of the typing program--and again, I may not have everything exactly right, but I think it'll give the flavor of it--was the notion that you didn't actually need to use monkeys for 00:31:00the typing program. and doing the challenges, that it would also be possible to determine the immunologic types of the viruses by taking--again, this gives flavor even if it's not exactly right--by taking the serum of monkeys that had been immunized with virus of a known strain--type 1, type 2, or type 3--survive the infection, let's say, and then that the serum would contain antibodies against type 1 or type 2 or type 3. And then what you can do is to take unknown poliovirus, mix it with the antiserum against type 1 or type 2 or type 3, and 00:32:00see which one of those types of antibodies or antiserums neutralizes the virus and prevents it from infecting animals, infecting tissue culture, et cetera. So there were ways in which the whole process could be speeded up from--as compared to the initial design of the study, which was mandatory to follow and needed to be done. And again, if I understand correctly, what ended up happening is my father did it his own way--also did it the way it was prescribed, but did it his own way, and finished the program a year and half ahead of schedule because of just being able to take advantage of the greater speed of that process, but then did everything according to the books. When all was said and done, no additional immunological types of poliovirus showed up, so just three types. But in the 00:33:00process of doing this, it became apparent--and I'm not going to be able to pin down exactly for the moment what it was that was the key here, but doing these immunizations of animals and working with the sera that contained antibodies, it became clear that this was a method that could be used for developing a vaccine. And the method would consist of inactivating the virus chemically and using that as an immunogen to raise antibodies that would then protect the host against the deleterious consequences of infection. Isabel Morgan had done something similar already at Johns Hopkins, and who knows what would've happened--again, if I understand correctly--if she hadn't chosen to favor family over career. In any 00:34:00event, this was the program that then was initiated in my father's laboratory. He had brought on a number of very strong scientists to take part in this program, and I'll introduce them not in the chronological order in which they joined the program. But [Dr.] Julius S. Youngner was the chief scientist amongst them. I don't really fully know exactly all of the contributions that Juli made. Juli died a couple of weeks ago, and we can certainly say some things about Juli, his impressions and his concerns about credit and so on because that is 00:35:00certainly a part of the story. Juli certainly, I know, was responsible for the tissue culture technique that was used to grow the poliovirus. [Dr. John F.] Enders, [Dr. Thomas H.] Weller, and [Dr. Frederick C.] Robbins figure into this. They won the Nobel Prize for discovering how one can propagate poliovirus in tissue culture, and that was a key to being able to make the vaccine. But Juli's contribution in that respect consisted of mincing the monkey kidney tissue--or testicular tissue, but kidney tissue was the primary tissue that was used--using trypsin, an enzyme, to break down the proteins that would keep the cells 00:36:00together, allowing one to get a dispersion of cells that could then grow in monolayer in tissue culture. Poliovirus could be added, grow, kill the cells, harvest the virus, and then the virus could then be used in whatever way. So that was one critical step. I understood from Juli's obituary that he saw himself as having been responsible for the inactivation procedure and that I have no way of knowing at this point. I don't know what the actuality was there. So, let me momentarily step back from that, and I'll come back to it. The others that were working in the lab--[Dr. L. James] Jim Lewis, who did handle the 00:37:00animal work, the monkey work. [Dr.] Byron [L.] Bennett, I think was primarily responsible for mouse work that was done--I'm not going to get all the sorting exactly right. Later on, [Dr. Percival L.] Val Bazeley came on board from Australia. This was later in the program when they were scaling things up because he'd had experience with large-scale manufacture of penicillin during World War II. So this was the core team of scientists, but in addition, a remarkable group of technicians, quite a number of whom stayed with my father the rest of his life. They included Elsie [N.] Ward, who was responsible for the tissue culture work, and she was just a remarkable woman who was like a gardener--she loved the cells that she grew as if she was tending to flowers. So 00:38:00there was Elsie. [Donald E.] Don Wegemer, an absolutely super technician, could do superhuman things and handle experiments. And I learned this firsthand because I ended up working with all of these three people that I'm mentioning now, with Elsie and with Don and also Francis [W.] Yurochko. Don was a super tech. He just handled complex, large experiments--fully organized, extraordinary person. And Francis Yurochko, who was primarily engaged in the animal work, also doing laboratory work--and there is one photo of my father injecting someone, and then one of the Pittsburgh schools later on in the program in the 00:39:00background, you see Francis filling syringes.

So these were wonderful, strong people. I ended up, for reasons which I can say, at the fiftieth anniversary of the announcement of the success of the polio vaccine, which--I'm getting way ahead of myself--going to the archives of my father's papers, which were and still are now owned by the University of California, San Diego, in their special Mandeville Special Collections Library, to go through the personnel records and list everyone--in each of the years starting whenever it was, 1947, 1948--who was paid from the National Foundation [for Infantile Paralysis] grants. And I don't remember right now the numbers of these people. There were several hundred altogether, including people who were 00:40:00engaged in the clinical sites. It was a large group. So where to plug back in? I'll say a few things more about the scientific aspect, one of which was that the key to the whole process was being able to inactivate the virus completely. If you had--if there was residual live virus in the vaccine, you could end up causing polio in a recipient. And indeed, there had been two attempts in the 1930s to create polio vaccines: [Dr. Maurice] Brodie and [Dr. William H.] Park and [Dr. John A.] Kolmer. Brodie's attempt was using formaldehyde to inactive the virus, which I think was at that point grown in nervous [nerve cell] tissue, 00:41:00which is problematic because of causing autoimmune responses. But it was basically add formaldehyde and stir, and it didn't inactivate all of the virus. As a consequence, kids in whom that experimental vaccine was tested ended up getting polio. Kolmer was trying to weaken the virus to create a live vaccine with a weakened virus using ricinolate, I think, from castor beans. And that, similarly, was not a successful approach, and kids ended up getting polio. So both of those attempts colored the field for the next couple of decades. One of the critical things with this attempt to create an inactivated vaccine was, how can you be sure that you've got a vaccine that doesn't have live virus remaining 00:42:00in it? The key to that was monitoring the rate of inactivation, and this was using formaldehyde or formalin mixed with the virus preparation that had been grown in tissue culture. Various factors that needed to be controlled and taken into account: temperature of the reaction, concentration of formaldehyde--formalin, pH of the solution, filtration of the virus preparation, adequate filtration to remove remaining clumps of cellular debris from the substrate in which the virus was grown--the reason being that if there was clumps of material, cellular material, still left, the virus could hide inside 00:43:00and not be exposed to the formaldehyde. So if you chose your conditions correctly and you plot on an arithmetic scale--arithmetic curve, a 100%, 90, 80, 70, et cetera--the inactivation rate over time, taking samples of the--add formaldehyde, stir, particular temperature concentration, et cetera--you'll see a curve which is basically shaped sort of like this. It starts out with a higher rate of loss of virus in that arithmetic scale, and then asymptotic continued decay. But if you take those same points and you graph them on a log scale--a semi-log scale, so time is linear here but here you have a 100, 10, 1, .1, 00:44:00.01--the same data, if you have your conditions chosen correctly, is a straight line. What that means is this: you're measuring, and you get down to a certain point, and you can't measure any further than that because you're at the limit of detection in a laboratory assay. You're only dealing with whatever small amount of material you have, and at the limit of the sample that you can take and measure the virus, you're not going to get any further in terms of your understanding of the rate of kill. So you go down only to the point that you can measure, and you're still going to have live virus, it's just below the levels that you can assay in. Wind forward--I won't name names, but there are still 00:45:00programs being undertaken looking at other modes of inactivation. And within these last few years I've looked at data, and the limits of the assay are the limits that you can detect in the lab, not taking into account this fundamental principle that you get down to the limit of detection, and that doesn't mean anything in terms of whether you have live virus left. So you have to go back to this thinking in the 1950s, which is that, OK, if it's a straight line, you can project it, and you keep going, keep going, keep going--you no longer can sample or test, but in the one specific chart that I've used--we'll talk about this--it goes another three days out. Three days, you get to the limit of detection, 00:46:00another three days projection. But then if you were to go another three days beyond that, out to nine days--if it were to continue as a straight line, which is the hypothesis--you would be at a point where after nine days you would have approximately one virus particle left per--I think it's ten trillion doses [actually one trillion doses] of vaccine. So a thousand times the current world population, whatever it is. So that was the principle. Now, rolling back to Juli Youngner, I don't know what his role was in that whole process. If you chose the conditions wrong--and they tested all of these--that straight line was at body temperature, 37 degrees centigrade. If you cut it down to room temperature, 25 00:47:00degrees centigrade, it begins to curve. If you do it at the temperature of melting ice, it distinctly curves. If it's [not], you'll never get to zero, but you'll get to one in ten trillion doses. If it's curving, you're not going to get anywhere. It's just not going to approach safe. So this is a really important point. I don't know what Juli's role was in this. At some point, I want to understand this better. You'll talk to my brother Darrell, I hope, to talk to him too and try and get some more insight from his side. OK, now there's another issue. What needed to be looked at was, OK, all the parameters that you have a safe preparation, the conditions of inactivation also have to be harsh enough to kill the virus, but gentle enough not to destroy the outer protein coat of the virus, so it would still be immunogenic and induce an antibody 00:48:00response. OK, first thing--why antibody? What's happening here? Poliovirus gets into the body through the mouth, it can grow in the pharynx, it grows primarily then in the intestinal tract, is excreted in the feces, and if that's all that happened, you end up with a minor illness, if any illness. But--and I don't know how frequently this actually happens--I know that it's on the order of only one in every one hundred or two hundred people who are infected with poliovirus that go on to become paralyzed--mechanism of paralysis--this was all being learned just in that recent period of history--none of this had been known before, how was the virus transmitted, how did it cause paralysis? But it became clear--and 00:49:00forgive me, I think this may have been [Dr.] David Bodian's work, but that may not be quite right either, because everyone can correct themselves by simply looking at the actual history--the virus would travel from the intestines into the bloodstream--I don't know how the lymph would be involved in that--but into the bloodstream, travels through the bloodstream, and from there to the nervous system. In the nervous system, then, the virus infects the anterior horn cells, the cells that control the muscles. So that's where paralysis then ensues, because of the damage to the anterior horn cells in the spinal cord or in the brain. So we're taking a diversion into your question about males in the family, and you said my father was the oldest of three sons. I'm the oldest of three 00:50:00sons. I have a son. My father's next brother down, [Dr.] Herman [M. Salk], was a veterinarian, started out with two sons, then they moved to California. Some interesting history there in terms of Herman, his wife, both veterinarians. Herman had worked at Parke Davis [Pharmaceutical] in Detroit. My father was in Ann Arbor. My father came to Pittsburgh. Herman followed to the country, set up shop, worked at Shalom Research Farms in Mars, Pennsylvania--not so far from where we lived in Wexford in the country--growing mice. There was a mouse house, raising other animals. The farm, owned by Ben Paul Brasley, a wealthy attorney 00:51:00in Pittsburgh, who was quite generous philanthropically and not quite so generous to people that he was employing. They had horses, sheep, chickens and so on, used for preparing blood, horse serum, chicken red blood cells, et cetera, and the mice used in the polio vaccine development program and also elsewhere. Herman and Sylvia, with their two sons, moved to Palm Springs. Herman then went into veterinary practice. Given the stringent financial conditions they lived under, he moonlighted as a vet on the farm, and the kitchen table 00:52:00would be cleared and used as an examination table, and then dinner would be set up, et cetera. So two daughters came along then, in Palm Springs. The youngest son in that family, [Dr.] Lee [Salk], was a clinical psychologist. He had a son and then a daughter. Ellen and I, the first pregnancy was a daughter, but she was stillborn. Darry has two sons, and Jonathan has two sons. So yes, there is a predominance of males. Maybe it would be refreshing in a way to keep on that theme a little bit, just--you know. I can get really wound up in the details of 00:53:00the scientific story. I was really personally grateful for that same tendency of my father's, which was when we moved to Pittsburgh, he again wanted to live in the country. It wasn't as full country as a farmhouse, but we lived in Wexford, along Route 19 north of Pittsburgh, Perry Highway. And there was a row of four or five houses along the highway, Maple Drive, going down the hill, unpaved drive, a few houses along it, and woods and fields. And it was just an absolutely idyllic place to grow up as a kid. So we arrived there when I was about three and half. I remember the drive through Pittsburgh because we arrived at night, and the blast furnaces, sparks coming out of these tall chimneys. It 00:54:00took a little while after we had moved into the house. There was a house behind us, the garage with cars on the bottom, and up top where the Dizes lived, Tilford and Helen Dize and their daughter, Sandy [pronounced "Saundy"] or Sandra [pronounced "Saundra"]. She later had a younger sister, but Sandra was one of my friends. And then there was Kenny, Kenny Hartman, who lived down the hill--if you cut through the fields you'd get to it more quickly. His grandparents lived up along the highway, so you could go that way and down the hill or around. He and I--that was just my closest friend when I was a kid. He was three years 00:55:00older than me, but somehow it worked. I was probably four when we first met and hooked up. So that friendship lasted the entirety of the time we lived in Wexford. We moved into Pittsburgh when I was nine. So it was a run of about maybe five years of the friendship. It was an appropriate time because I was nine, and he was twelve, and he was beginning to get interested in girls, and so his attention was moving in a different direction. But we still know each other. We're still in touch. He's had some hard health issues over recent years, but we last saw each other in the summertime last year, and I'm really blessed that 00:56:00there's been that continuing contact with him. We had, as part of my--I'm really going to jump around. My father died in 1995. The centenary of his birth was in 2014, and as part of that, I gave a talk at the Pine Community Center, which was 00:57:00built on what was part of Shalom Farms. There was the part where Ben Paul Brasley lived, and that became the farm, the barn, and animals and so on--a place where serum was centrifuged to prepare samples to go into the laboratory, that's now Pine Community Park. Then down the road, down the hill, is the part of the farm that Herman and Sylvia lived on, which I just loved. He was liberal with me. I ended up driving a jeep and driving the tractor and so on, and playing in the barn and the haylofts and mostly bales of hay. What did Michael--go back with me. I don't think he was there at that 2014 event, but it would've been just somewhat before that he was there with me. And at that point, and I think still now today, Herman's barn is still there. The farmhouse is gone, but there's a family that lives there. So I got to be up in the hayloft with the bales of hay. It was just a really moving experience to be back there. For that centenary event, friends from the old neighborhood were there, a lot 00:58:00of--just the kids that had lived around there. So let's see where to take it now. Well, I'll stick on personal again for a little bit, I think. So Darry was three years younger. Darry was born in 1947, and Jonathan was born in 1950, and this was still while we lived in Wexford. My mother, just to say a little bit about her--one of Kenny's favorite people. He just really loved and admired her, and just was full of memories of her playing the piano and singing and driving 00:59:00us places--just a very gifted woman, very intelligent. Trained as a social worker, gave up her profession when she had kids. Extraordinary, just a very sharp sense of humor, very good at languages. She spoke German, French fluently. Later on, in 1957, we ended up as a family, going to Europe. My father had a polio conference in Geneva [Switzerland] in 1957. And in preparation for that trip--we were going to go to France, Geneva, and Italy--my mother learned Italian to be able to get along in Italy. Then, when we ultimately moved to California, she learned Spanish because of the indigenous--the Spanish population.

There was for me--on a personal basis, there was always a sort of pull in terms 01:00:00of, where do I go in my own life? Because I incorporated things from both parents in my own genetic and upbringing makeup. I was imprinted early on with the observation that the degree of respect that came to my father by virtue of his being a physician, being an M.D.--and I saw that independent of anything that had to do with the research, this was just, he was an M.D. and that really 01:01:00counted for something. So very early on, I had a desire implanted--it was my own--to have that same degree of respect, and had in my mind that I wanted to have an M.D. after my name. Later--and I would place it at probably around nine years old, because it would've been in the summer or warm season, still in Wexford, we had a grassy yard, and there was one point--I mean, you've asked in your sort of guiding questions about what was it like around the dinner table and so on. I don't remember conversations around the dinner table that had to do with science and research. Maybe they were happening, but it wasn't registering 01:02:00for me. I suspect--I mean, I know my mother and father would have talked substantively about the work. She admired my father. She trusted him and his approach to science and his instincts. Perhaps not so much admiration for some of the writing skills, because the phrase I remember her saying is that he wrote English as if it were German, like with the verb at the end of the sentence. And so she would--at least I know that there were some--I'm not sure that it was all, but some of the research papers he would write, she would help edit. I don't know how extensive that was, but it's part of the story.

OK, I'm going to break away from that. I'll get back to mine in a second. Also, 01:03:00you had asked about what was it like in terms of my father, and was he around much and so on. From my vantage point, early on in Wexford all three of us kids went to Falk [Elementary] School, which is the laboratory school at the University of Pittsburgh--small school, nurturing--some aberrations, but a nurturing environment with some remarkable teachers. I remember I can name all of them for you. I started in junior nursery school when I was three and a half. Whatever it was--senior nursery school, I had a very unfortunate experience of being one of the older, if not the oldest, kid in the class, and maybe acting a bit more aggressively than the teachers liked, or being disruptive or whatever 01:04:00it was. So as a way of modulating my behavior, halfway through senior nursery school, I was moved into kindergarten, which was a devastating experience for me. I was no longer--rather than being the older kid. I was the younger, smaller kid in a group of strangers. It was a really, really difficult, and personally damaging experience. I don't remember the names of the two nursery school teachers, but kindergarten was Mrs. Bronstein, first grade was Mrs. Brewster, second grade was Mrs. Craig, whom I didn't enjoy very much. She had some aspects to her interacting style that weren't the top of my favorite list. Third grade, one of the most wonderful human beings in the world, Miss Hawkins, Marjorie Hawkins. She was just love incarnate, and all of the kids loved her. Mrs. 01:05:00Gerstein in fourth grade. Mrs. Hammitt, just a great teacher, in fifth grade. She was a really hard, hard, disciplined, good, good teacher. One of my favorite things in the world was her teaching diagramming sentences. I don't even know if they do that anymore--subject and object, and predicate, and gerunds, and prepositional phrases, so it was just great, I loved it. Miss Pence, this is sixth grade, she had been in the Marines or Navy or something. She had some military background. She was in love with a man who was blind and was engaged to be married. The class got together and bought a wedding gift, a hexagonal clock. 01:06:00And her parents lived in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, ended up nixing the marriage. They were not in favor of it, and it didn't happen. Mr. Walkowski, "Mr. W," in seventh grade was the algebra, science teacher. Mrs. Felton was the eighth-grade teacher--social studies, history, English in seventh and eighth grade. We went back and forth between the two teachers. Anyway, that was just a wonderful experience early on. Initially, I think--I don't know how it was divided, but I remember my father, who would drive me to school in the morning, going on his way to the laboratory, so that was alone time with him. With my father, my job was to shift gears. It was a Chevy or a Ford--I don't remember what car he was driving, maybe it was--the Chevy was his. The stick shift on the floor, and 01:07:00mostly--well, except for one occasion when we were approaching a yellow light, and I instinctively then moved it into neutral, but that was at the moment that he decided he was going to try and run the yellow light. So that didn't work out [laughs] quite well. So that was special. That was a special time. There was some aspects of his personality or his training or upbringing that were a little bit off mark as far as I was concerned. When I was going through this really hard time in kindergarten, having been disrupted in the way that I was, he dropped me off in the classroom, and I just remember distinctly this one morning 01:08:00I wanted him with me and was making a boat out of these log sorts of things, and at one point looked up and he was gone. So he had thought, Peter is occupied, he'll never notice. Well, not only did I notice, but I cried the entire rest of the day until finally, the teachers called him at his office, and he had to come pick me up. So where was the next step from here? Then there was a point at which my mother would drive us into school. It's about forty-five minutes in both directions. So I'll leave that at the moment and then go to--my father would come home late at night, so generally, dinner would be just the kids. That was true both in Wexford and then when we moved into Pittsburgh. The most 01:09:00memorable homecoming--my father would come home not infrequently with his tie clip with a little note under it, which would be sort of some to-do list, and the memorable occasion was his coming home one evening, picking up Darry, holding him over his head, and my father's pants, loosely belted or whatever it was, fell down [laughing]. OK, so getting back to me and my relationship with him--there wasn't a lot of playing. He just wasn't one for--I don't know if we ever in our life played catch. Maybe this was a sign of things to come, in a sense. I do remember this one occasion, the summer-ish--probably nine years old, because we hadn't yet moved to Pittsburgh, maybe it was a year before that, but I suspect it was '53--sitting on a blanket with him and his talking about the 01:10:00work he was doing, which included him showing some graphics of whatever it was with the antibody levels and the increases and this, that, and another thing. I left that piece out. I'll have to get back to it. But the impact on me was--it was a very meaningful moment, because I was intrigued by what I was seeing, and that aspect of a relationship between the two of us in that moment. What came up in me was this desire someday to work with him. So that was sort of like the start of either that blessing or that curse. There's both sides to it. So we 01:11:00ended up--so what was going on--OK, I'll hit a scientific thing and then I'll continue with the more personal. They had a preparation in the laboratory, inactivated virus tested in animals would induce an antibody response. And the significance of that was that if there's antibody in the bloodstream that provides a barrier so that the poliovirus cannot travel from intestine, bloodstream, nervous system--antibody in the bloodstream provided a barrier, would neutralize the virus and protect against paralysis. So to protect against paralysis, all you needed was antibody in the bloodstream. So that was the indicator. And once the animal studies had demonstrated that the inactivated virus preparation boosted antibody levels, did not cause polio, then my father 01:12:00and his team--I think my father--because at that point that was--certainly these decisions and these organizational issues were in his hands--the next step was to go into kids, and the first step in that process was to inject children who already had had polio.

These were kids at the [D.T.] Watson Home for Crippled Children, is what it was called at that point, just outside of Pittsburgh and Sewickley. And the initial experiments were undertaken using the inactivated virus preparation of the same type that had infected these children. So they were protected. If there was going to be any problems by the live virus, they would be protected against infection. And what was being looked for, the question being asked, is would injection of these kids with the inactivated virus preparation boost the 01:13:00antibody levels that they already had? Because they had antibodies in their blood from the experience of the infection that they had had. And of all the moments in this entire program, this was the most significant for my father. Blood tests taken and looked at in the laboratory, my father coming in, and--whether this was his observation or Elsie's observation, whatever--that moment of, the antibody levels was boosted, for him that told the whole future story. That was enough. He knew that this was going to work, and this was going to be a successful vaccine. Now plugging that back into Juli Youngner and the 01:14:00question mark. The way of testing for antibody was to grow virus on the tissue culture cells. So you have the kidney cells, grown in tissue culture. Add virus, and the virus would kill those cells. The way you can determine that is looking through the microscope at the monolayer of cells in culture and looking for the cytopathic effect of the virus--cytopathic, causing the destruction of the cells--laborious. If you want to determine--OK, so let's get antibody into the picture. If you add serum in dilutions to the mixture of virus and cells, if there is antibody present that will neutralize the virus, you won't get the cytopathic effect. The cells will survive. So to test how much antibody is 01:15:00present in the serum, you dilute the serum. So you have a highly concentrated serum, and if there's antibody, that will neutralize the virus. You dilute it another twofold, and twofold, and twofold--or whether it was tenfold, it doesn't matter,--twofold, and test that. It neutralizes virus. Fourfold, eightfold, sixteenfold, and at some point, you'll get to a point where the virus is no longer neutralized. So that's the endpoint titer, or whatever the right 01:16:00expression is. So you--say the antibody level is 1:256, that many dilutions, and it neutralizes virus all the way down until you get to the last dilution. At 128 it neutralizes, 256 it doesn't--or whichever, it may be 256 it does and 512 it doesn't, so one of those is then the endpoint. And that's the titer of the antibody titer. That's a laborious process, testing it, adding it, looking in the microscope, and so on. A major breakthrough was the development of the so-called color test. That allowed them to do a lot quickly. The color test was based on--and this is my belief, this is sort of hearsay from younger years, youth, whatever, I don't know. My belief is that the color test was based on an observation by Elsie Ward. I may be wrong about that, but that's my belief. It sounds right, and it feels right. Elsie growing cells, looking, and so on. What was involved there is in the medium that is used to feed the cells. So you have cells growing, medium liquid on top with nutrients, and a dye is added--I think 01:17:00it's phenol red. In the absence of the cells growing, the color of the medium stays pink. If the cells grow and metabolize the nutrients, they create acid metabolic byproducts, and that turns the dye indicator yellow. So if you have a culture of cells where the virus doesn't kill the cells, the cells grow, and the medium becomes yellow. If the virus kills the cells, the medium stays pink. So that's great, but what you do with that? How this then got developed into the final test--it's possible that that was Juli's contribution, turning that 01:18:00observation into a practical test. I don't actually know the history, but what you do is you take a rack of test tubes, and you add the cells in all of them--virus in all of them--and then different dilutions of the antibody. Put that on top of a glass shelf--it's a little rack with a mirror, a slanted mirror--and look at the tubes, and you just see the pattern. You know what the dilutions are, and you count, OK, so four rows down or four columns down, whatever it is, this row of tubes, I guess, turns yellow--no, it turns pink, because the yellow ones would be--the virus had been neutralized, the cells grow 01:19:00as yellow and then it turns pink, and that's the endpoint. It's just fast, rapid, simple, straightforward, done. So that was a major technological advance in the program. We could use this, and then that Juli may have turned it into the systematic technique, I just don't know. Maybe Darry will know when you talk with him. He may have a sense of that. But in the obituary, Juli basically has stated that his major contributions had to do with both the trypsinization and the inactivation, I don't know, and the color test. So I just don't know what the actuality--open question in my mind, and it well may be all of that may be true. I just don't have a sense of that. TORGHELE: I loved hearing about Elsie 01:20:00Ward, though. There's very little to know about any female scientists then. And Elizabeth Morgan. She married Joseph Mountin.

SALK: Joseph?

TORGHELE: Mountin.

SALK: I don't know.

TORGHELE: He's one of the people who came up with the idea of the Centers for Disease Control.

SALK: Ah, interesting.

TORGHELE: He was a big public health guy, and he had a son that she adopted. His wife had died, and she gave her life taking care of that boy. They were very close. His father died before she did, and then he was killed in a plane accident when he was twenty-eight. And who knows what she would've done as a 01:21:00scientist, or if she regretted her choice. She may not have, I don't know.

SALK: OK. I'm going to digress. Sometimes linearity gets fatiguing, so let me say--OK, I wanted to tell the story about David Bodian because you had asked about him. But this means a really substantial jump in time because my memory of David Bodian has to do with when I was in medical school. So I'm missing a chunk of life. I went to Johns Hopkins as a first-year student, lived in Reed Hall, a barracks of a building with no humanity around it, in the middle of a depressed 01:22:00neighborhood to some extent. Sort of trapped, moving from Reed Hall to the classes and back, and eating in dining halls. It was a medical fraternity, two medical fraternities. So at some point, I ended up in this Nu Sigma Nu, which was sort of an eating club. At one point in the winter of that first year, Dr. Bodian and his wife invited me to dinner. It was wintertime, and it snowed--snowed so much I couldn't go back home to Reed Hall and needed to stay 01:23:00there overnight, and I was in heaven. It was just so nice being in a home. If I'm remembering correctly, they had two boys. Woke up the next day, snow everywhere, and spent the day playing with them in the snow. It was just a really meaningful experience to me. But I could tell that Dr. Bodian was getting a little bit restive and wanted his life back and was eager to--now that the snow had died down, was eager to drive me back to the dormitory setting. And I really did not want to go. I was just really so happy in a family setting. I remember at dinnertime, with whatever conversation was going on, feeling a little bit exposed sitting next to Dr. Bodian, because he was a professor of 01:24:00anatomy and I just had this feeling that he could [laughing] look inside and see all the details of me, and it was a little unsettling. That was my memory of him.

Other people, Tommy Francis--you know, it's funny, I remember him, but I may remember him more now based on that film, The Shot Felt 'Round the World. There's just so much there. So I think I could go on to infinity linearly, so I'll do a little jumping somehow, because I want to get to Dr. Francis and my father and their interaction at the time of April 12, 1955. So let me sort of shortcut the time to that which was after the Watson home trials, expanded 01:25:00trials, in Pittsburgh. The community got totally behind this vaccine project. Parents of kids in the city schools were recruited for a program in 1954 that the National Foundation required prior to moving into a massive large-scale field trial. I think there were about five thousand school kids in Pittsburgh that were involved in that intermediate phase, and--I'm going to get this really out of sequence, and it doesn't really matter--but things that needed to be evaluated in that time between the Watson home and moving into a field trial: what's the dose of vaccine, how frequently to administer it, what are the 01:26:00intervals between doses? And that turned out to be really important. If you gave doses all close together, you didn't get nearly the size of the ultimate antibody response as if you waited for seven months after the second injection of vaccine before giving the third injection. That allowed the immune system to mature to the point that you would get a secondary antibody response, a big boost. So those were various parameters that all needed to be understood. Then the National Foundation undertook this huge national field trial that involved 1.8 million kids in almost all states in the United States, some in Canada. I think Finland was involved in that study as well. There was tension around, how 01:27:00would that trial be designed? My father was adamantly opposed to a placebo-controlled trial, because it just went against his instincts, not wanting to inject a kid with a placebo when they could be injected with a vaccine and be protected. So that really troubled him on a moral basis. It's an interesting aspect of my father. There was some part of him that liked being--followed his heart, and also not only tolerated but even at times favored nonrigid experimental designs. So that's a bunch that could be said about all of that. Fortunately, Tommy Francis got engaged as the person who was going to run 01:28:00or be in charge of the evaluation of this field trial. So it ended up he insisted on a placebo-controlled trial. Fortunately, it was absolutely necessary if you were going to end up with any meaningful results that would convince anybody. Part of the trial--the National Foundation, Basil O'Connor had already committed to an observed control design, where kids in the second grade would receive vaccine, kids in the first and third grades would not be vaccinated, and use them as an observed control group. There's weaknesses in that kind of design, and it showed up in the final results. And the other areas--I don't have all the exact numbers, but it was maybe about approximately six hundred thousand 01:29:00of the 1.8 million children were part of the placebo-controlled trial, and the remainder observed control--so it may have been different proportions. So we come then to--that trial was initiated. It was late, very close to the onset of polio season, so it was at the end of April, I think April 24 or 26 when that field trial was started. And they compressed the vaccine schedule to try and get three doses in before polio season--I think it was all three. The most unsettling thing from my father's point of view about the field trial was that 01:30:00the [U.S.] Public Health Service required that the vaccine that was used in the field trial contain Merthiolate as a preservative. My father was concerned about this because--the way I understand it, although there are some samples in the collection of materials that still exist from that period that in a way contradict that--but the way I had heard the story was there was concern because vaccine containing Merthiolate had never been tested, and what if the Merthiolate were to have a detrimental effect on the potency of the vaccine? So the field trial was started, my father nervous that it wouldn't work out if the Merthiolate indeed interfered with the activity of the vaccine. And maybe there were some preliminary hints about this. Again, samples exist from earlier on 01:31:00that contain Merthiolate, and so those samples are still in existence. If I understand correctly, what my father then did, as the field trial was going on, was to test the Merthiolate-containing lots of vaccine against vaccine that did not contain Merthiolate. However it was structured, he was observing during the course, as the trial was going on, that in fact, especially the type 1 component of the virus was being--the activity was almost wiped out by the Merthiolate, substantially reduced. It turns out that if you add EDTA [ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid], a chelating agent--the trade name was Versene--you could prevent that degradation of potency. Nevertheless, the trial 01:32:00went on. The announcement after all the analysis took place was about a year in the making. April 12 was the day that was chosen in 1955 for Dr. Francis--wasn't my father. You always hear that Dr. Salk announced the results. He didn't. This wasn't his trial. He didn't even know--he didn't learn what the results were until the morning of the announcement at breakfast on April 12. So, Dr. Francis made the announcement, which was that in the observed control areas--I won't have these numbers exactly right--the vaccine was 70-80% or 60-80% effective, and in the placebo-control areas was 80-90% effective. So safe, effective, 01:33:00potent. My father went into that--I don't know what to call it--it wasn't a press--it was, however, you would describe it, the occasion of the announcement being made. And my father had a room full of scientists and so on, having to give a talk after Dr. Francis was going to speak. And what was he going to say? He had no foreknowledge of which way the call was going to come out, and he ended up focusing his attention, if I'm not mistaken--I have some images in my mind of some graphics from reprints of the presentation that my father made--some of them showed the effects of Merthiolate wiping out the potency, and 01:34:00the effects of Versene and so on. And his whole thrust was how to make the vaccine better, how you can make it more effective. I don't have the details in my mind as to what he was prescribing, but I think his fundamental message was how to get a vaccine that's 100% effective. Well, Tommy Francis, to use a lay expression, was pissed. This was his moment. This was a year's field trial, all the work that went into the evaluation--the announcement of the effects. And here comes Jonas Salk now talking about how to make the vaccine better. It didn't sit well with Tommy Francis. And you can see photographs of the two men on that occasion which are really telling, that in the back of one's mind--one might not notice this if it weren't for knowing that back story, but very glum expressions--certainly on Tommy Francis's face, with both my father and Francis looking very uncomfortable together. So that was the occasion, after that 01:35:00announcement, which [Edward R.] Ed Murrow on the See It Now program, or whatever it was, interviews the scientists--something--interviewed my father--and I think Dr. Francis was there, too--and at one point asked my father, "Dr. Salk, who owns the patent to the vaccine?" And it's a really telling segment because my father starts to say something, but then you see this sort of light go on in his mind, and his answer was, "Well, the people, I suppose. There is no patent." Then a little stumble, and then this light goes on, and he says, "Could you patent the sun?" Actually, this sort of is moving to me. So that's a phrase that sits with people, and it's morphed into kind of a--I don't know what the right 01:36:00word, expression is--urban legend or something like that. So the way the story has ended up being spread is that Salk refused to patent the vaccine. Well, it wasn't that my father refused to patent the vaccine. The actual story is that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into a patent, what could be patented. Some of the material had basic principles that had already been published. Can't patent that. Some of the work had already been--this was a technique that had been used already. Formalin-inactivation of viruses, there's nothing new about that. Maybe how it was done in this linear straight-line business may have been new. But then looking at maybe patenting the adjuvant, 01:37:00which never ended up being used clinically, or some of the production techniques. What stuck in my mind about this because David [W.] Rose, who had been the archivist for the March of Dimes, provided files to me. I got into that question. I wanted to understand when Michael Moore made a film called Capitalism: A Love Story. There will be people with many political persuasions, different political persuasions, watching this. I loved it. I thought it was a really great movie. And he had wanted to use this piece in a previous film 01:38:00having to do with, I don't know, healthcare, something, but he chose to put this--it's a little bit after the middle of that movie--took that segment and did a really nice visual job in terms of the way it was cut, and then sort of resting on my father with this beaming face after that expression.

TORGHELE: I may have misheard you, but I think you said the placebo group was 80-90% effective. I misunderstood what you said.

SALK: Well, let me clarify it. Because you were feeling that I might have said that it was the placebos that were--OK, so the two portions of the field trial, observed control, second graders immunized, first and third graders not. In that portion of the trial, when you compared the number of kids who got polio during that polio season who had been immunized, received the vaccine, compared to the first and third graders who got polio that season who hadn't received any vaccine, that comparison showed that the incidence of polio in the vaccinated 01:39:00second graders was 60-80%. Wait--a portion of my brain is significantly fatigued, so without trying to get that really hardly put together precisely--in that setting the vaccine was 60-80% effective in reducing the incidence of polio in the vaccinated kids. In the placebo-control portion of the trial where all the kids--I don't know whether it was first, second, and third graders, I don't remember exactly, but let's pretend that it was--it could've been all second graders but let's say it's first, second, and third graders, some of whom received vaccine--nobody knew who got vaccine or who got the placebo, which was just the medium that was colored the same and so on. In that portion of the 01:40:00trial, the comparison between vaccinated and placebo--nonvaccinated kids who [received placebo injections but] didn't receive the vaccine--in terms of the incidence of polio that polio season, there the vaccine was 80-90% effective. So I guess what that means is that the vaccinated kids developed polio at 10-20% of the rate of the kids that had not been vaccinated. So the opposite of 10-20% is 80-90% effective. Now, why the reasons for that--which I understood once upon a time, and I'm probably not going to be able to recreate under my present physiological circumstances, having to do with some kind of selection bias. I think that the kids who volunteered in the observed control areas--who 01:41:00volunteered or whose families volunteered them to receive vaccine--were of a higher socioeconomic level than the kids who then constituted the observed control group. The higher socioeconomic levels were kids who had fundamentally better sanitation. OK, sanitation and polio go together in the following way: polio has been around for thousands of years. It was ubiquitous. Kids would be exposed to polio, before the advent of modern sanitation, very early in their life, within weeks or months of being born, at a time when they would be 01:42:00protected by the antibodies they had gotten from their mothers through the placenta or through the milk. Since it was a widespread illness, so there were some people who would get polio without being protected by the mother's antibody, or later after the mother's antibody had gone away. But primarily it was a sporadic disease, kids having gotten exposed to polio while they were still protected. Sanitation comes along and changes all of that because kids were no longer exposed to the virus in the open sewers and so on very early. They wouldn't be exposed til later on, at a point where they were no longer protected. And that's when polio turned into an epidemic disease, spreading and causing massive, massive outbreaks. So in the observed control portion of the trial, the kids who were--the families who were in a more--higher socioeconomic 01:43:00group, better sanitation, what-have-you, would tend to be more susceptible to polio. And therefore the incidence in those kids compared to the observed controls would be higher in the vaccinated--as a baseline--in the vaccinated group. So the vaccine had more to work against, so to speak, and so that's why the effectiveness measured turned out to be less in the observed control portion compared to the placebo-controlled portion. OK, so somewhere we were dealing with patents. And the National Foundation wanted to patent the vaccine, and I don't believe for mercenary reasons. I don't think they were looking to make a profit. They were doing everything they could to put money into the vaccine, making it available. The money was all raised through the March of Dimes--no government funding. The success of this program was the people in this country, 01:44:00movie theaters, door-to-door, mothers' marches, and so on. It's the people in this country who deserve the credit for this vaccine through the instrumentality of the March of Dimes, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. So I think what they were wanting was to protect and make sure that the vaccine was going to be properly manufactured.

TORGHELE: One of the points you made the other day to me was because we had a case-control trial for vaccinated children in this country and we didn't with the Sabin trial, the Russian children--

SALK: No, actually you wrote that down. I don't remember having described that. OK, let's get to the Sabin thing. Let me finish the patent business. So the inside story here is the patent attorney, who was hired by the National Foundation, doing everything he could to get my father's attention, because he needed information from my father to pursue what he needed to pursue, as far as, is this patentable, is it not patentable? My father wanted nothing to do with 01:45:00this. He was busy. He didn't want to take his time away from what he was doing. Had no interest in a patent. This was not his motivation. He wasn't thinking about money. He was thinking about getting a vaccine that's going to work and be effective. He was thinking about two things. Two things were driving him--I'm not sure that "equally" is a fair thing to say, but it approaches that. The major thing was the need for a vaccine, getting a vaccine out. It was needed. The second thing also driving him was his teacher in medical school. This principle--he wanted to demonstrate the principle that you can immunize successfully against a viral illness using an inactivated vaccine. So, two poles to what was going on. So what is fair to say is that my father had no interest in a patent. This was not on his radar screen. It's not true to say that my 01:46:00father refused to patent. He didn't refuse anything. Ultimately, the patent attorney recommended to the National Foundation that they not pursue a patent, that there was not going to be a successful--whatever one would say. That's fine-- that was all going on, my father was doing the work that he was doing. So the flavor is absolutely right. This was not what was driving my father, but it is also not the case that he nobly refused to patent the vaccine. This was the people's vaccine. And whatever goes around the Internet about, he turned down. He could've made I don't know how many billions of dollars--whatever might have been true in theory, that's just not the way things went. But what was true was his nature and what was driving him. Okay, so vaccine. Introduced April 12. The 01:47:00results announced on April 12. Vaccine licensed the same day--which is rather different from present circumstances. Two manufacturers made vaccine for the field trials, Eli Lilly [and Company] and Parke-Davis. Carefully controlled situation. The National Foundation required eleven consecutive batches of vaccine to be made without any contamination with live virus, in addition to the lots of vaccine being tested on an individual basis, and not to cause polio in laboratory animals. The field trial went without a hitch. Four other manufacturers came on the scene. I won't name them all successfully--Pittman-Moore [Inc.], Wyeth [Pharmaceuticals, Inc.], Merck Sharp & Dohme [Pharmaceuticals], and Cutter [Laboratories]. I may be missing something. 01:48:00The vaccine rolled out, and after April 12, within two weeks, kids started getting polio from the vaccine, from the Cutter vaccine. It was a horrible experience. And I have--there's a really good book by [Dr.] Paul Offit on the Cutter incident, Cutter episode, [The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis] whatever the title was. But I don't think it went--from my vantage point, it didn't go far enough in terms of really putting the finger of blame where I think it belonged. And that is--forgive me if I don't have everything exactly right--the people at Cutter just did not want to follow my father's prescriptions. The prescriptions were--there were no exact prescription, take this amount, and this amount and this amount, because the 01:49:00conditions are different. Everything my father did in terms of the experimental vaccine that he tested was in his laboratory. The industry was in a much larger scale. All the conditions had to be established appropriately for the industrial setting. But the principle that my father laid out was this straight-line inactivation. Monitor the inactivation process all along the way, if you've got a straight line, fine. If it's deviating from a straight line, you have a problem. If I have this quote right from a member of the Cutter team, the observation that "every lot of vaccine was a goddamn research project," which they didn't want to do. Cutter philosophy--I'm being a little sarcastic here--is mix and stir. So a number of things went into this. Cutter was producing lots of vaccine that contained live virus. What happened with those lots? Discarded and 01:50:00never reported to anybody. So, field trial, National Foundation required eleven consecutive batches from Lilly and Park-Davis without any live virus. After the field trial, government responsible for licensing, for monitoring, for testing the batches. No requirement that Cutter report any problems. They just submit the vaccines, the lots that didn't fail their test. Government test them in what turned out to be at an inadequate scale. So after all was said and done, the government tightened up the regulations, things were changed. And this never happened again, but the fundamental problem here was just this flagrant disregard for what had been prescribed, in addition to which, in the laboratory 01:51:00setting the virus suspensions--viruses are grown in tissue culture--suspensions filtered using a really high quality Seitz filter. Filtered out the debris, you get a clear suspension of virus, no clumps of anything, formaldehyde inactivation goes linearly. Industrial scale, good filters go too slowly. You want to speed up the process, so you use fritted glass if I have that right--fritted glass filters. The material moves through the filter much more 01:52:00quickly. Wonderful, except so does the debris. So Cutter also--whether there was another way of doing this, doesn't matter. The result, Cutter would allow the filtered material to sit for some lengthy period of time before adding the formalin, allowing the clumps of debris to protect the viruses. So everything has changed since then. It hasn't happened again. It was a horrible situation. I think, all told, something on the order of 220,000 people were infected, including the injected kids and the people that were exposed to them. About 170 people were severely and permanently paralyzed, of whom ten died. So the program was stopped until everybody in the government had straightened out whatever they needed to do, and then ultimately it got back on track. So let's follow the 01:53:00course of the incidence of polio in the United States. Increasing from 1941 up to the peak incidence of 58,000 cases in the country in 1952. This will be total cases, divided into paralytic and non-paralytic. Up and down in the years. Vaccine introduced in 1955. By 1961, seven seasons later, the incidence of polio in this country was reduced by 97%. Then you see a little arrow in the graph. In 1961 you have this little bit of tail left to go, and into the picture comes the Sabin vaccine, introduced in 1961. I'm going to be sarcastic. Please forgive me. 01:54:00I probably could help it, but I don't really want to. Trumpets and fanfare, okay. The vaccine--I'm really exaggerating, but I'll just do it. "The vaccine to end all vaccines. Far superior to the inactivated vaccine. Superior in principle, superior in potency, higher antibody levels, longer duration of immunity--" I mean, the whole schmear. So, with trumpets blaring, this new vaccine comes along. I don't fully understand all the ins and outs of the politics and the AMA [American Medical Association], et cetera. There were concerns about-- the inactivated vaccine never could be used fully in the way it could have been in terms of public clinics or what-have-you. The AMA wanted tight control of doctors' office [use] and so on, and how the Sabin vaccine sort of-- Whatever happened, the Sabin vaccine is ushered in, widespread use. As a 01:55:00kid, I would've liked it administered on a sugar cube instead of injections. With two other proclaimed advantages--one, that it would produce intestinal immunity, immunity in the intestinal tract that would prevent--if you got an infection, ingested the live virus, it would prevent infection from establishing itself in the intestines. My father's point of view was that's not really important, and it may not have been important at that phase--we'll see what happens later on in the story--that all that was necessary to protect against paralysis was the antibody in the bloodstream. So intestinal immunity was a big deal from Sabin's point of view, and we'll touch on that again. The other thing 01:56:00that Sabin touted as an advantage was that the vaccine virus would spread through fecal material to other people, thereby immunizing other people in the surroundings who hadn't received the vaccine. Okay, perhaps nice in theory, and that was touted as an advantage. But from the get-go, the live vaccine caused polio. Sabin, as I understand it, never to his death, admitted that, or believed that the oral vaccine actually caused polio. You can look at two graphs drawn in the air. We're going to look at Sweden and Finland, two Scandinavian countries that never used the live vaccine. Killed vaccine introduced--again, log scale for this portion of the demonstration--with a straight-line decrease on a log scale. Twelve years later, polio gone in those two countries. You couldn't even 01:57:00find the virus in the sewage. So, demonstration of the effectiveness of that procedure in those settings. United States. Killed vaccine introduced, log scale linear decrease, live vaccine introduced, and it looks as if it's about halfway down on a log scale--remember, the rest of this is the last 3%--continues, live vaccine introduced, decline in cases of polio caused by the wild naturally-occurring virus at the same rate, same slope, no "live vaccine as the 01:58:00hero was coming along and it's completing the job that the injected vaccine couldn't." Same slope. Eventually--it took longer in this country to get to no continued circulation of wild virus or cases caused by wild virus circulating in this country--some cases introduced from importation from other countries here and there. I don't have a grasp on those details. But add to this graph another line, and that's the line that looks like this, starting in 1961, which are the number of cases of polio caused by the live vaccine. So what's going on--this went on around a bit, around, say eight to twelve cases a year for decades, decades, decades, decades. What's going on is--and I have not yet read a paper that came to my attention a few months ago, so I've always interpreted that the mutations that weakened or attenuated the viral strains used in the live vaccine 01:59:00were point mutations and could very easily be reversed, thereby allowing the virus to revert to a virulent phenotype. From what little I skimmed of either the abstract or something about that paper, it's probably more complex than that, and there are cassettes of different additional mutations that can take place, that can cause the attenuated virus to revert to a virulent form, including recombination with endogenous, other enteroviruses in the intestinal tract, that then can complement in whatever way. So I don't have a grasp on really what's taking place, but the bottom line is that the phenotype, the attenuated phenotype, is unstable genetically. And what ends up happening is--and I don't think it's infrequent, it's always touted, "Oh it's very rare, it's very rare that the virus will revert to virulence"--I don't think that's 02:00:00actually the case. I may be wrong. I think it's a relatively infrequent event, it's rare that someone ends up being paralyzed by it, but it's an ongoing process. So my father was really upset. He was upset in 1961 because the experiment was being destroyed--to determine, can an inactivated vaccine bring polio under control? It did in Sweden and Finland. Could it have done so in the United States? Unknown, never--they couldn't proceed. So my father was upset at that experiment being ruined, so to speak. Upset at the prospect that kids were going to get polio from a live vaccine that would revert to virulence, which it turned out it did. Upset because the inactivated vaccine became unavailable in this country. I don't know how many years it took, but it wasn't all that many. And many years before, the only vaccine you could get in this country was the 02:01:00live vaccine. So parents were having their children immunized with a vaccine that caused polio, without any alternative, with no informed consent, without being told there's another option that's safe and effective. It didn't exist. So this went on until I don't know when. And my brother Darrell can give you lots of information about this because he was one of the--he would be an expert witness. And people started suing. I don't know all the ins and outs of that.

What I do remember is the story that Walt [Dr. Walter A.] Orenstein has told, which is really moving. The ACIP, whatever--Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, thank you--would meet, and everybody was scared. They knew this was a problem, but they were afraid to make a change, because what if they stopped 02:02:00using the oral vaccine and went back to the injected inactivated vaccine--what if it was really not so good? What if it was a terrible mistake on their part to make that decision? So they were scared, and didn't, you know--were being very conservative, until, as I remember Walt putting it, the meeting that took place. I don't remember what year it was--'98, I'm not sure. And as I remember him saying it--I may be dramatizing a bit--into the meeting room walked or were rolled on wheelchairs, the crop of patients, as I remember, from that year who had developed polio from the vaccine. That had an effect. It certainly had an effect on Walt and changed his way of thinking. I think in '98, they introduced the inactivated vaccine to help protect against the so-called vaccine-associated paralytic polio caused by the oral vaccine. And then, in 2000, stopped the oral 02:04:0002:03:00vaccine completely, so oral vaccine no longer used in this country because of the safety reasons. OK, so I may need another break in a moment, but let me just do a little bit--and I think I can do it pretty quickly--on the eradication program, triggered by Rotary [International] with work they started in the Philippines--PAHO, Pan American Health Organization, and [Dr.] Ciro de Quadros. So the extraordinary story of using the live vaccine wasn't comforting to my father, as the means of going out now to try and eradicate the poliovirus globally. OK, the Rotary Philippines work was started in '85. In 1988, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was established as a partnership among WHO [World Health Organization], CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund], and Rotary. Later on, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had become partners in the program, if I'm not mistaken. And it's been an amazing story with remarkable success, and still some hurdles to overcome. In 1955, if you look at a map of the world and color the countries with polio red, it would have been--the whole entire world would have been red, with around six hundred thousand cases of polio a year globally. By 1988, when the eradication program started, polio was already essentially gone in--I forget the coloring--polio caused by the wild virus, gone in the United 02:05:00States, Canada, parts of South America, parts of Europe, maybe Australia, I can't remember all of the countries. So we were down to about 125 countries with polio, and about 350,000 cases a year. Projected goal of eradicating polio by the year 2000 didn't happen--began to run into obstacles and slowed down, pretty much of a plateau for a decade or so. Independent Monitoring Board put in place, people really putting attention on, what are the hurdles to getting access to all of the kids using the oral vaccine? And again, substantial progress is resumed. So the best year up to 2012 was 223 cases of polio caused by the wild 02:06:00poliovirus. Next two years, a bump up. We were--at that point, 2011, India had stopped transmission of naturally occurring polio in its country, which was remarkable because it had always been thought India, with its complexity, is never going to be able to bring polio under control. They did, leaving Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria as the only countries that up to that point and still today have never stopped transmission of naturally occurring polio within their borders. 2000 came along, and people began noticing--it was known that people were still getting polio from the vaccine itself, the VAPP, 02:07:00vaccine-associated paralytic polio. But what became apparent was that there were also circulating strains of vaccine-derived polio, cVDPV--circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus--outbreaks caused by the vaccine virus that was spreading, causing outbreaks of its own. Potentially huge epidemics, that hasn't occurred, but there have been substantial numbers. I think in--between 2005 and 2010 in Nigeria there were 319 cases of polio caused by circulating vaccine-derived viruses. And the period from 2000 to 2016, perhaps, I think there were 894--or something on that order--total cases of polio caused by the circulating vaccine-derived viruses. So if you look at it-- But then, OK, and, you've got resistance going on. Nigeria in 2003, rumors that the polio vaccine eradication program was a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Pakistan in recent 02:08:00years, Taliban targeting and killing vaccine workers, largely female workers, so hurdles to overcome that have to do with political, religious, and cultural differences in those countries. Lack of access, areas of Pakistan that couldn't be accessed at all because of Pakistan, the Taliban, keeping the vaccine workers out. So a lot of attention on the part of the eradication program to cultivating ties with the community, making connections with religious leaders and doing a lot to improve gaining access. But still it's limited, and it's not 100%. So that is a major problem that still needs to be overcome and is the limiting factor, at this point, in terms of moving the eradication program to completion. 02:09:00We're now at a point where, by the end of 2016, thirty-seven cases of polio caused by naturally occurring--the wild polioviruses, five cases caused by the circulating vaccine-derived viruses. But then if you put the VAPP on the map, polio caused in vaccine recipients or their immediate contacts, mothers changing diapers--that, as a published paper in 2014 was estimated, on the basis of data, to be running along at around four hundred cases a year. So, put it in perspective--if you have four hundred cases a year of polio caused by the vaccine in the context of tens of thousands, or what have you, you have one attitude toward it. When you're down to thirty-seven cases of naturally occurring polio, and you have four hundred cases of polio caused by the vaccine, 02:10:00it's a different arena. And so you're getting rid of the wild virus, and you're continuing, year after year after year, to be reintroducing vaccine viruses. Finally, it became clear that if we're going to eradicate polio, we have to stop using the oral vaccine. It has to stop if we're going to get rid of the virus for good. First step, of the three types of poliovirus, type 2, last case in Bangladesh, perhaps it was in 1999. So no more wild type 2. But the predominance of the circulating, the cVDPV, polio caused by the circulating virus has been type 2. So the first step is eliminate type 2 from the oral vaccine, and that's been done. So now we're using bOPV, bivalent oral polio vaccine, which is intrinsically more potent anyway, because the viruses interfere with each other and you don't have the type 2 to interfere, stronger response to types 1 and 3. 02:11:00So that step has been taken. And in theory, what was going to be done was to introduce, for the first time in many places, the original inactivated vaccine, now enhanced in potency through some work done in the '70s and '80s, so more potent than the original vaccine, perhaps capable of inducing immunity with even one or two doses or with fractional doses, with lower doses. So that is underway. It hasn't lived up to what was envisioned, to get the injected polio vaccine to blanket the populations in all countries. I won't go into the details of the numbers of countries at this point. Slow introduction, limited supply. Vaccine manufacturers had been focused on the live vaccine, less expensive, easier to produce, and so on. So it's moving slowly. There still are some countries, it--it's been tiered to the introduction in the most at-risk 02:12:00countries for circulating polio vaccine-derived polio, et cetera. So the process is underway. It's a bit of a lip service to what was intended, to lay down a base of immunity against type 2 before you remove the type 2 component in the vaccine.

So, moving along, so progress is being made. In 2017--and I think we were at five cases, my last look, not so long ago, of polio so far this year caused by the wild virus. Zero by the circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. Moving along. OK, where will this end up? I don't know, because we have--I'm going to add now one other observation, which--I think I may have mentioned on the phone to you--was shocking to me when it came to my attention, which was in 2013. 02:13:00Israel previously had used live vaccines, stopped using live vaccines, using only injected vaccine, began to find wild poliovirus, origin Pakistan, in their sewage. Tested people in the catchment areas, or whatever the phrase is, and found live wild poliovirus, type 1, I think it was, in the stool of people who had been fully immunized with inactivated vaccine. OK, so what does this mean? It had been known for ages, and studies in the 1960s cited in one of the publications that my father and brother, Darrell, had written--it wasn't their work--if you look at--and this is part of the false claims--if you look at the 02:14:00antibody response to, in the different types of antibody, to the injected vaccine versus the live vaccine, identical except for one thing--if you look at the IgA [immunoglobulin A] type of antibody produced in the mucosa (nasal, intestinal tract), there's an IgA response to the live vaccine but not to the killed vaccine. So, an indication that the live vaccine was indeed producing stronger immunity in the intestinal tract. Question: What difference would that make? Walt Orenstein had shown me a table produced that was in a chapter that [Dr.] Roland [W.] Sutter had written along with I can't remember whom else on polio vaccines, which calculated--which compared the two vaccines in terms of 02:15:00the frequency with which, if you take people who had been immunized by live vaccine, immunized by killed vaccine, and then a challenge of live vaccine, how frequently would you detect shed in the stool virus in those people immunized by the one vaccine or the other? What was the titer of the virus? How long was it released into the--or shed from the intestinal tract? And the bottom line of that comparison, if I'm remembering correctly, was that the oral vaccine essentially obliterated the transmission of--the shedding of virus, whereas the injected vaccine, compared to someone who's not been previously vaccinated, reduced shedding by 95%. So a question, prior to 2013 anyway, was, what's the implications of that difference, 95% versus 100%? Would the injected vaccine still be capable of preventing circulating virus in a population? And Israel answered that question, at least in those environmental circumstances, with whatever sanitation issues and so on might have been present in those--in communities where this was taking place. The answer was, the injected vaccine protected against paralysis, but it did not protect fully against transmission of live poliovirus in the population. We're dealing with eradication of a virus. 02:16:00Get rid of the virus entirely, that's not enough. Not good enough. So here we 02:17:00are. We're dealing with two imperfect vaccines. Oral vaccine causes polio and reintroduces virus into the population. Injected vaccine doesn't produce enough intestinal immunity to protect against silent circulation of virus. What are we going to do? I think what we're going to do is we're going to juggle these two vaccines in the best way possible. What that means is going to happen on the ground, to get to the final goal of eliminating the virus. Exactly how will that take place? What will the juggling look like? If you end up in areas where protection is being produced by the injected vaccine, if there ends up being some silent circulation, you may have to come back in, as Israel did, with the live vaccine to stop the circulation. Put the live vaccine back in 02:18:00your--reintroducing the live virus into it. How is it going to happen? I don't fully know. Could it be done differently? I think, yes. I think--and this is my own guesswork--I think in this day and age with the contemporary tools and techniques, it ought to be possible to create a live vaccine that would be safe, that would not be able to revert to virulence. Maybe I'm wrong, but anyway, my suspicion is that you could do that. Killed vaccine, my suspicion is also that you could boost its effectiveness in such a way as to increase its ability to produce intestinal immunity, using adjuvants of one sort or another, using different ways of introducing it into the skin as opposed to injecting intramuscularly, and end up with a vaccine that would produce sufficient intestinal immunity. Those are guesses. I don't think either one of those is 02:19:00going to happen. It would be nice to have an ideal vaccine that was safe and fully potent. I think we're going to be in this muddle of juggling these vaccines until we can get it done, again, with the real limiting factor not being the vaccines, but being the social issues and access to all of the kids that need to be immunized, with another little flag out there, which is there are people who have been immunized with the live vaccine who have immunodeficiencies, and the live virus will continue to grow in those and continue to be shed. What significance will that have at a point when there's no other source of virus in the population? Will the shed virus from these carriers 02:20:00have a detrimental effect on the eradication program? What can be done to identify shedders, chronic carriers? Treat them with antivirals to eliminate the virus? The practicalities are a little bit mind-boggling there, so still question marks, still unknowns. It's great that Rotary is saying we're this close, and maybe we are, but there still are some unknowns as far as I'm concerned, in terms of--and so much progress, but how are we going to do it? How are we going to find our way through these last little bits of complexity? So I think I need another break. So if we can take one now, then we can come back to some of your more human questions. And then there's the whole issue of my father and the rest of his life, and what he did that is worth touching on.

TORGHELE: Okay, great.

SALK: So just the last thing on the Sabin/Salk business: that in a sense, these two people who had very strong ideas about how to proceed, in a sense, both of them were right and both of them were wrong. And there are strengths to each of the vaccine approaches, and there are weaknesses to each of the vaccine approaches. So fundamentally, the reality is that these two men who wanted to see things done, the one thing that they could agree upon, back in their lifetimes, was that only one vaccine should be used. But indeed, we're in a situation now where both are being used. And you asked about Debbe Sabin. I've become good friends with Debbe Sabin over the last handful or so of years. I felt really pleased about this. The beginning of my father's centenary year, 02:22:002014, was ushered in by Debbe and I taking part--riding on the Rotary float in the Rose Parade. So I felt that was a--and I just--I liked the coming together and the, you know, harmonizing to something. OK, so I know we should talk a little bit about my father and his life after the vaccine because, again, all during this time there's a part of my father that's--you can see it in photographs. There's this part of him that's thinking, processing, and thinking about things on a broader scale. He wanted to set up a new research institute in experimental medicine, and wanted it--and it was going to be at the University of Pittsburgh. So April 12, 1955. 1957, he was writing already about this, and wanted it to deal with traditional areas in experimental medicine, vaccines, 02:23:00infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, et cetera, but also was talking about the people that would end up coming to and working in that institute, anticipating that over time they would come to be dealing with, in addition to those areas, the problems that arise from man's relationship to man. And fast forward, here's where we are with the polio eradication program. What is it that's really holding things up at this point? The problems that arise from man's relationship to man. We're not getting along. We haven't yet come to a point where we're being able to relate constructively and for mutually beneficial outcomes. So the institute ended up not being established at the University of Pittsburgh, finally ended up in La Jolla, California. Worked with Louis [I.] Kahn on the 02:24:00design of the building, initial funding from the National Foundation March of Dimes, ending up with the design of an institute that is a spiritual place. Aesthetically an extraordinary structure, a remarkable place to live in, to work in. And again, what my father wanted was for this not just to be a place of pure fundamental biological science. Yes, that was important. The articles of incorporation at the Institute [the Salk Institute for Biological Studies], there were three purposes, having to do with advanced instruction, research, and training in biology; the cause, prevention, and cure of disease; and the third, understanding the factors and circumstances conducive to the fulfillment of man's biological potential. Broad goal, probably--certainly as important, if not 02:25:00more important, to my father than the other two areas. This is certainly a very different area. And part of the design of the Institute included a meeting center, in addition to the laboratory buildings, that would be a place for people to come together from the biological sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, to be putting attention on the problems that confront humanity that can't be solved in the laboratory. So this was a dream that my father had. There have been bits and pieces of forays into that at the Institute, primarily during the lifetime of Jacob Bronowski, a philosopher, who did the TV series The Ascent of Man. But fundamentally the Institute has chosen to remain focused on fundamental biology. Probably a wise choice, to be as 02:26:00successful as it has been, and it's been a remarkably successful place, scientifically. But a frustration to my father, who wanted these broader aspects of thinking dealt with. He continued to do so in his own life. He continued with research in his own lab. I came along to help out with work that he was doing related to cancer and the immune system, or the idea of mobilizing the immune system to help increase resistance to the tissues that arise from within, but that in some way are not normal and different, to fight and suppress the abnormal cells. You asked about HeLa cells and this having significance in his work. This is a continuously propagating cell line of cancer tissue, originally cervical cancer, from Henrietta Lacks, isn't that her name? It did play an 02:27:00interesting role in that after the vaccine work had been--well, it wasn't completed, from my father's point of view, until the '70s and '80s, when the enhanced potency vaccine was introduced, and wouldn't be completed until polio was gone, but the main focus on the polio work diminished. Very interesting observations had taken place in the monkey colony. Now was--again, here's Elsie, the cultivator of cells, and at one point she made a culture of cells from a monkey heart. So this was a monkey heart cell line. And they found that if you injected those monkey heart cells into monkeys, in some cases it would produce tumors, and in other cases, it would not. The correlation that they ended up 02:28:00making was in the monkey colony, at that time, there was a--tuberculosis was infecting animals in the colony. And if you skin tested the animals for their immune response--their cell-mediated immunity response--to tuberculin, the chemical from tuberculosis, the mycobacterium--those animals that had a positive TB [tuberculosis] test, if you inject the cells into those animals, they don't grow. Animals that were tuberculin-negative--not because they had never been exposed to tuberculosis, but because the tuberculosis was so advanced that it had destroyed that aspect of the immune system--the cells grew and caused tumors. On top of that, the monkeys that were tuberculin-positive had this 02:29:00cellular immune response but didn't have much of an antibody response to the tuberculin. Had a cellular response to the injected cells, but not an antibody response. The monkeys that were sick and tuberculin-negative, a lot of antibody against tuberculin, no cell-mediated response, a lot of antibodies against the injected cells, no cellular response. So there was a seesaw of the immune system that really struck my father. And fundamentally it raised the question, what can you do to manipulate the immune system? And in the case of cancer, as an example, where you want to have--apparently, or this was the thought--a strong cell-mediated immune response to reject these abnormal cells, can you shift the balance of the immune system in such a way as to enhance a protective immune response? In a disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, where 02:30:00it's apparently an autoimmune process, the body is attacking--the immune system is attacking normal components of the body, can you shift it in the other way and suppress the disease? So the long and the short of it was there was a cancer program that was going on here in the laboratory. After two years of hospital work, I decided that I wanted to stop what I was doing, come here, work with my father. For complicated reasons, and some of the complexity was this: My father had been criticized during the vaccine period for a couple of things, and I think rightfully so in at least one case, which is that during his talk on April 12 [1955], he thanked everyone under the sun for their contributions--March of 02:31:00Dimes, this person, that person, so on and so on. When it came to his laboratory team, the people that did this work and that were so vital in having this project succeed, he thanked them in the most elusive way, saying something to the effect that the people who have done this work have their own reward, something. This is vague language. Not mentioning Juli Youngner, Val Bazeley, Jim Lewis, Byron Bennett, you know--did I say Juli Youngner? OK. So I don't know where his mind was. Somehow, in his sort of makeup, that served as an acknowledgement of these people. But it didn't. It didn't. And the people went 02:32:00home in tears from that meeting, having been passed over. I mean, it's just a horrendous omission that as far as I--I don't know who he passed that by. He didn't pass that by my mother. And there were other things that had taken place where people felt, well, he was grabbing the limelight. The March of Dimes/National Foundation absolutely wanted to have an individual on which light would shine. It was a good PR thing, and so on. He was criticized at one point for, in 1953, going on the radio. He was about to have a publication appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the initial studies in human subjects. It got leaked to the press ahead of time, and a big hullabaloo. And my father felt I have to do something. And O'Connor and the 02:33:00National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the two of them absolutely together on this, We have to do something to temper this outburst of enthusiasm that the vaccine is just around the corner. So here's what's actually happening, here's what the studies have shown, here's where we are, here's where we're not. So he felt a responsibility to the public to get things straight. So that was interpreted as an--I don't know what, standing on stage, something. Whatever it was, the end result was that colleagues--he was embarrassed in front of his colleagues. This was not behavior that they felt was appropriate. And I think that it's a complicated truth, and I believe that there was absolutely good reason for him to want to relate directly to the public in that way. 02:34:00Nevertheless, the long and the short of it was that he was not seen as one of the scientific community in the ordinary way. I think that Sabin was partially instrumental in this. He wasn't accepted as a member of the--or installed or whatever it is--as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Didn't get a Nobel Prize. Whatever it was, he was seen as not on a par with the other of his scientific colleagues. And that hurt me, I mean, as a kid. I could feel his hurt. I could feel his sense of, OK, I've got to do something to prove that I am 02:35:00a scientist and prove that I can do it again. Something of that sort. So the first thing he did was he did this building--it's not only this building--this institution, the people that he gathered. He got--behind [us is] this letter from [Dr.] Francis [H. C.] Crick to his son describing the structure of--the discovery of the structure of DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid]. That wasn't work that was done here, but Francis Crick was here. Luminaries come together to populate this institution, and this institution continuing to be this extraordinary--this extraordinary powerhouse of scientific creativity--the people who you met today just walking through the place. But my father still felt that he had more to prove. And as his son, I identified with that and wanted to help shore him up, help him with that. So I came here. I think probably my primary motivation was to work with him and to help him in his efforts as far as this cancer immunotherapy was concerned. I had no scientific research training. He was not a 02:36:00good mentor to me in the sense of the weaknesses that I had, the areas that I wasn't strong in, turning out scientific papers, and so on. He was in his own world at that point and really was not capable of giving me the kind of guidance and mentoring and help that I would have needed to establish myself. But my purpose was really to be shoring him up, and I had my own sort of angles of things in terms of the research. I did step in and help with the multiple sclerosis program that he had going. They were having problems establishing some antibody assays. That was something I was really good at, is establishing assays. And I set up and established and standardized the assays that were then used in the clinical MS [multiple sclerosis] research project. And 2005 was the 02:37:00fiftieth anniversary of the polio vaccine announcement. There was a celebration back at the University of Pittsburgh. Juli Youngner was there in the audience, and I wanted to try and--whatever the right word is--salve, you know, help to heal old wounds. Juli was not happy, was not happy with my father, and carried anger to the end of his life. And as part of that presentation, I went through the listing of--I listed the names of every person that were in the records that had worked on that project the year they came on and so forth. I wanted everybody to get credit for what they had done. And as far as Juli and his sense of having been passed over, I just shared my own experience with my father, which was the publication of the MS study results. I showed a slide of the title 02:38:00page of the publication, which had whatever names that were on it--Charles--I'm forgetting the names, [Dr.] John Romine and whoever was at UCSD, and Jonas Salk. And strangely missing was any reference [to me]--with all the graphics from the antibody assays that I had created, put together, standardized, et cetera--no mention anywhere, anywhere, neither as a co-author nor acknowledgement. Nothing, no acknowledgement. So it's part of my father's nature. He just didn't think that way. He owned--this was his project. And he was always thinking about it--took for granted the inputs from me, his son. So the point in showing that slide with the little search--you know, little screenshot of the search bar 02:39:00searching for Peter Salk, not found, was then to say to Juli in the audience, you know, that it seemed to me that we had more in common than we might have realized. So I just wanted to sort of help establish--something that I was really, really pleased, after that, either the talk or at the end of the session or something like that, Juli and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the stage, and we approached each other, and somebody caught us just reaching out to shake hands. And in the last talk that I gave at the University of Pittsburgh in January to Grand Rounds Student Affairs something or other, I really made something about Juli and his--and had a little section at the end when--it came after the eradication program and discussing all the eradication business, and 02:40:00if and when this happens, where does credit belong? You know, it's to the people, everyone in this country who contributed, et cetera, et cetera and here's a picture of Juli and the important role that he played--and found myself saying that I thought it was--whatever the words are, I think it's in his obituary, being quoted, "It's fair to say that had Juli not been there, this vaccine never would have come into existence." So I think those are all true things, and I think it's really important to put things right.

So here's my father with his complicated personality--poured himself--the cancer work was important to him. The MS study, he pushed it as far as he could, it reached some limits, and I won't go into the details--couldn't be pushed further, but he's really trying. And at the end of his life, the AIDS epidemic had come along. He found himself pulled into it and helping to mediate between [Dr. Robert] Bob Gallo and [Dr.] Luc Montagnier when there was a dispute as to 02:41:00who gets credit for discovering HIV [human immunodeficiency virus], the virus that's responsible for AIDS, and to get them to reconcile and agree on a history, a mutual history. I mean, he did that, he came in to mediate because he perceived that the--Jon Cohen, who we ran into in the courtyard, wrote about this to some extent--[controversy] was tearing the field apart. It needed to be resolved to get things on track. And at that point, he began to think about what about an inactivated HIV vaccine. He had closed his lab in 1984, had no laboratory available to do the work, tried to pitch it to various places to see if somebody wouldn't take this on--the Army, NIH [National Institutes of Health], and this, that, or another place--and nobody did. Finally, he ended up 02:42:00saying yes to an offer, to which he had said no several times, to become involved in a new--biotech is not the right word--company that's--I won't go into the details--someone had wanted to organize. He said, Yes if you take on this HIV vaccine project, I'll be part of it. Twenty-year run of that program. My father died early on in it, in '95. It started up in '86, '87. Really interesting results--an inactivated vaccine with mineral oil adjuvant, which from way back in the beginning--stepping back and looking at it in perspective, doing an unofficial--personal, based on data in my files and in my computer, not comprehensive--analysis of years' worth of clinical studies, looked as if 02:43:00they're statistically significant effects on slowing progression of HIV infection in individuals already infected who were immunized with this inactivated immunogen. Whether that analysis will ever be done fully and completely, I don't know. The project died for lack of funds, never became something that was used in the clinic. But still interesting, I think, results. He wanted to move it in the direction of a prophylactic vaccine, and that didn't happen. And that's where I referred to the words that I won't be able to reproduce, that my son Michael had put into this little brochure for the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation--something to the effect that this man just continued to put his attention on trying to solve important human problems with varying success, but with unflagging--and the word that fills in that gap I'm not sure, 02:44:00but you can fill it in for oneself. He was engaged in all sorts of things. He helped with--I won't remember the names of these things--childhood immunization, Healthy Children--I'm forgetting the names of the programs. He contributed widely and broadly. And I mentioned the quote that's inscribed in the entryway to the Institute came from an address he gave in 1977 on the receipt of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, and that was, "Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality." That address, the title of the address that he gave then, was a question: "Are we being good ancestors?" This man thought really broadly. My brother Jonathan--he [Jonas] wrote four books: Man Unfolding; The Survival of the Wisest; with my brother Jonathan, World Population and Human Values: A New 02:45:00Reality; and finally, Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason--[all] dealing with biophilosophy, as he did put it, thinking about where we stand in the scheme of things, looking at a sigmoid curve as a thinking tool. Take cells, as we've talked about, grow them in monolayer, they're normal cells, they'll grow exponentially. They begin to touch each other, contact inhibition, and they plateau. Fruit flies, yeast. This kind of curve is seen in nature. Human situation, at that point--the book published in 1981--exponential growth, slow growth over millennia, and then industrial revolution, scientific revolution, being able to overcome external constraints. Just enormous exponential growth of population, at that point, where is it going? It can't go on forever. We don't want it to do what can happen in nature, like with deer who overgraze their environment. Can we indeed move in this kind of trajectory where it's a sigmoid, 02:46:00S-shaped curve, continuing numbers, increase in numbers, but a slowing in the rate of growth and a plateau and sustainable phase of existence? The way he thought about things was that in this phase of our experience, what he called Epoch A, the emphasis is on growth, it's on competition, it's on win-lose, it's on overcoming external constraints. In this phase, a totally different reality--a new reality that where the emphasis is not on competition, it's on cooperation, and it's not on overcoming external restraints, it's on imposing self-restraints, it's on win-win, both/and. So where we are now? We have now passed the point of inflection-- this has happened. The curve is bending, and 02:47:00the people who are being born in this generation are being born into a different world. The '50s, the sky is the limit. Our present era, we've got global warming, depletion of the oceans, we can go through the whole list--my brain isn't producing. It's a different reality that we're living in. And what do we need to do as human beings to help create this kind of a successful transition? World population and human values. My brother Jonathan, the co-author, has just redone that book, revised it extensively, turned the title around backwards, A New Reality: Human Values and World Population. It's a beautiful little book, which hopefully will end up seeing the light of day. We need to think within ourselves, how are we going to do this? What do we need to do in terms of our own consciousness and our own values, our own thoughts? And he saw evolution--that where we are in the scheme of things, he saw evolution in three phases: Big Bang, universe comes into existence, physical evolution, atoms, 02:48:00molecules, stars, galaxies, solar systems. Then biological evolution, what we usually think of when we think of evolution--life appears, and then all the complex evolution of single-celled organisms, multi-celled organisms and so on and so on, and humans. Where we are now is yet a different phase of evolution, which he called metabiological evolution. It's the product of our minds, our thinking, all that we have created around us in our environment. This is where evolution is taking place. It's not growing different numbers of fingers, it's 02:49:00in the realm of the products of our thinking and, fundamentally, our consciousness. So I'm going to shortcut my own life. You wanted me to say something about that. I worked with my father--had the pulls between my father and my mother and my own interests in music and poetry and languages. I'm choosing to follow along the lines of my father. Different person didn't have his training, didn't have his drive. I wasn't out for a career. Wanting mostly to support him, work with him at the end of his life after fourteen, thirteen odd years here at the Institute, on the AIDS vaccine project. He died in '95. I continued to work on that. Got pulled into dealing with the fact that at the end of the 1990s, there was treatment for AIDS. Fine, ten thousand to fifteen thousand dollars a year here in the wealthier part of the world. Africa? Asia? 02:50:00Nothing. I mean, nothing. In 1998, the World AIDS Conference, Bridging the Gap--wasn't any bridging the gap going on. There's a gap, but there was nothing being bridged. Ending up working with the people in Malawi, with a group that had been pulled together from this country to help them think through an AIDS treatment program. That country had just at that point--and this was the year 2000--completed its five-year AIDS program. And in that document, the word treatment didn't appear. So how to get things going? So that was the next sort of phase of my life.

After my father died, my brother Darrell, who you will talk to, taking over things having to do with my father, his legacy, his estate, and so on. Got tired after some time, and there was a--I ended up stepping in primarily to help take 02:51:00over some of these activities, and that's why I ended up at the University of Pittsburgh talking on that occasion. Otherwise, it would have been Darry, had he not needed to step back at that point. Ended up starting up the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation in 2009 to deal with both historical materials, documents, many of which were on deposit at the University of California, San Diego. The family [of Jonas Salk], which owned them, donated--in 2013-'14, donated the physical papers to UCSD [University of California, San Diego]. Copyrights went--that were associated with my father--went to the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation. There still are projects pending. Some extraordinary, extraordinary items and materials in that collection, including the original--there's this Audograph machine that was a dictation machine that had these little red or blue disks, and we've got things from the late 1940s through the 1970s, I believe, his original dictations, dictating thoughts, memoranda, scientific papers, and 02:52:00so on. It's really extraordinary, and I haven't listened to all of them. I think it's going to be an amazing process to get those digitized and available as indicated.

Working now with the family on what I hope will end up being a gift to the University of Pittsburgh of some of these laboratory materials, materials that have been in cold storage. Ron Evans talked about opening refrigerators when he was here--my father was still here at the Institute--and there are these original samples from the 1950s, original vaccine samples. The vials that go along with that straight-line inactivation curve, fourteen hours, twenty-five hours-- I mean, it's really amazing stuff. So that plus some documents, large 02:53:00and small laboratory equipment. I'm hoping, and I think it's highly likely, that they will end up with the University of Pittsburgh, the Graduate School of Public Health back there. Dealing with continuing to educate the public about my father in all aspects of his life, not just the polio work, the eradication program, but also these more philosophical areas. And taking on--and I'm hoping that this all will become strengthened conceivably with the relationship between the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh. Waiting to see about that, but at this point, it has rested primarily on me. You met Walter Eckhart, one of the directors [of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation]. It really needed some strengthening through collaborations, and I'm hoping that this will be an avenue through which some of that strengthening will take place. But some outward, outward-facing programs--one at this point having to do with vaccination and immunity education in high schools. The long and the short of it 02:54:00being that we are victims of our own success. We vaccinated so successfully against diseases that they're not hitting us in the face the way they were, with polio and the epidemics that engaged everyone in an effort to develop a successful preventive measure. Now we have parents who don't want to immunize their kids because they are afraid, and they're afraid--I mean, it's reasonable to be concerned, of course, at any point, and it's clear that there are times when vaccines can have adverse effects. You've got the live poliovirus vaccine, there's just no question. You have to be alert and make appropriate policy decisions about what to do, and the appropriate decision ultimately was made in this country, stop using the oral vaccine. OK, that's fine. We've got rumors which have not been substantiated: vaccines cause autism, pertussis vaccine causes brain damage, and so on. It just has not turned out to be the case. So 02:55:00one of the things that we're confronted with is that once people have made up their mind against vaccines, it's really hard to change. And I think there's a series of studies, only one of which I've read, having to do with influenza vaccination, where people--if you confront people who've made up their minds against the flu vaccine, and confront them with facts, it just makes matters worse. It just hardens their resistance. So the idea has come up, let's roll the conversation back earlier into people's experience, have a vaccination and immunity curriculum for use in high schools, conceivably middle schools, so the kids can be exposed to the different ideas, the different controversies, facts, 02:56:00how things actually work, with the hope that when they become parents themselves, they'll be in a better position to make informed decisions. So we've piloted a curriculum here in San Diego County and in parts of California that include two--a variety of activities, the first of which is The Shot Felt 'Round the World--or actually it's the Smithsonian Channel's version of that film, called A Shot to Save the World, which gives an emotional experience of--it's a film of what it was like before the polio vaccine and how people reacted, how the vaccine was developed, and how people reacted when the vaccine turned out to be successful. It's a big deal. It's missing from the present-day emotional experience. There's a second film called Invisible Threat made by kids in [a] high school in Carlsbad, just a little bit north of here. They had decided to make a film about the vaccine controversy. Didn't know at the outset where they 02:57:00would come down, and it became absolutely clear to them as they were going through this where they came down. And it's a really emotionally powerful film. So, those two activities, the preliminary study that was done. The Shot Felt 'Round the World [A Shot to Save the World] was felt by the kids to have the most impact on them, Invisible Threat second, and then various of the other elements. So that's a program that still is underway and hopefully growing. I'd like to see that used and expanded.

The other thing is potential interventions on smaller community and larger-scale, conceivably global levels to help with this transition,n and dealing on the level of consciousness to increase harmony in the world. We're really towards the end of our time. I can speak in greater or lesser depth about 02:58:00this. To me, it's a fascinating area. And I feel somewhat the same kind of motivation that I believe my father had, which is, on the one hand, the practical implications of some work that's been done, looking at--the bottom line of this is looking at some meditation procedures that appear to--when practiced as individuals in sufficient numbers, and particularly in large groups, appear to have an effect on reducing stress in the surrounding society--even, if the numbers are great enough, on a global level--reducing crime, reducing war violence, reducing accident rates, drug abuse and so on. So the outward need is there, and I'm fascinated by the implications in terms of the structure of nature. What in the world is going on here? How could it be that people sitting, closing their eyes, practicing some meditation 02:59:00techniques--what would be the mechanism by which a constructive, beneficial influence would spread on a larger scale? And my own reading of it--and it's not my own personal thing, but it certainly is my reading of it--is the suggestion being that nature's structured in levels from more gross to finer. The Salk Institute, among others, exploring the structure of nature at deeper and deeper levels, that at the basis of all of this, there's a field of unity. That's what [Albert] Einstein was looking for--he was looking for a unified field. Physics has been moving inexorably in that direction. Four fundamental forces, electromagnetic, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and gravity. Independent, four separate force fields in nature, which, as more technology is available and higher energy levels used in experiments, progressively these 03:00:00separate forces have become unified. Electromagnetic field and the weak nuclear force, one. It's different at the surface; one, deeper down. Further deep down, unifying, bringing in the strong nuclear force. Not yet completed, unification with the gravitational field. But the progress, to me, the trend is there. And it's ultimately going to be put--all the pieces will be put together on a theoretical basis. My impression is that what we're dealing with is a reality in which at the base of nature there's just one unified field, which is not only the basis for all of manifest, objective existence, it's also where our subjectivity lies. Subjectivity is an aspect of existence. What is it? From my vantage point, it's not just the activity of brain cells, there's a fundamental aspect--there's fundamental reality to subjectivity, to consciousness, and 03:01:00that's what's going--and this is my impression, that's what's going on here. That when people are practicing these techniques, it's an effect that's exerted at that level of commonality, which is common to all of us, both animate and inanimate existence, so to speak. So that's an area that I really want to pursue. I'm beginning to do some work. I participated in an effort to try and get some grant support some years ago for an independent evaluation of the research in this area. I still think that would be a useful thing to do. There's some fascinating studies, and I won't go into the details now, but it's really interesting, and to my eye, very strong results that suggest that this is a real effect.

Also, we're beginning to look at here, in relation to some people at UCSD, potential community interventions in some refugee immigrant communities here in San Diego. Beginning to talk at the University of Pittsburgh about a similar 03:02:00program with a different meditation, potential intervention, that's being used back there in areas with some depressed economics, high opioid abuse and opioid deaths from overdose. So I'm really pleased. It's something I've been interested in for many years, and personally involved with to--you know, and one angle of this in any rate--and I'm really--I'm feeling happy for myself to begin to unify some of these different areas. I don't think my father would have gone this direction. He liked the ideas that he was putting together and communicating. I think they were really important. My own bent is now to try and take some action steps in that direction. And I'm feeling happy, finally, because I've been living sort of like two separate lives. I've had this interest going on, but I've been devoted to my father and his interest and his legacy and so on. I'm 03:03:00really liking the idea of being able to sort of put those things together. So that's the sweep of things. I said I would--before we end, I would say something about Françoise. My parents were divorced in 1968, something of that sort. They had been married for--make the subtraction, '39, '68--twenty-nine-odd years, something like that. My father remarried. His second marriage was to Françoise Gilot, a painter from France. They were married nearly twenty-five years at the time that he died. She's a remarkable person. She's--part of why she's known is that she had two children with Picasso. She has a third child from her prior marriage before my father. She's an absolutely remarkable human being and an amazing painter and a very striking person. Still lives in New York now. She was 03:04:00from France, goes back on rare occasions at this point. I think she's ninety-six, and just a remarkable person. And that was a really important phase 03:05:00in my father's life. My mother--extraordinary, I mean, just, you know, really a remarkable woman--not completely well matched in some ways, but some ways extremely well matched. Both socially progressive, et cetera, but my father had a hankering for something else in life. And Françoise really provided that in terms of--my mother's favorite activity would be to go to bed and read a book. Françoise brought something more in terms of outwardness in society and so on, and so that was a really--and plus, just the nature of the personal relationship, it was a really important phase of my father's life. I've probably left out all sorts of things, but I have also talked a whole lot.

TORGHELE: I want to thank you so much. You have presented a picture of a very complex man that you obviously love and have emulated in lots of ways, but also in your own right have made important contributions and continue to do so. So we'll look forward to hearing more about that. Thank you so much.

SALK: You're welcome.