Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio

My grandma's bookshelves are always full. I'm grateful for this when I don't have the time to visit the library or the money to visit the bookstore, but it does make for some odd reading choices.

Splendid Solution by Jeffrey Kluger is one of those books that I never would have picked up on my own. It's about the development of the polio vaccine, mainly focusing on the biography of Jonas Salk, the scientist who invented the vaccine we use today. Kluger presents Salk's story as the triumph of science over public fear and other researchers' intellectual hubris. It's surprisingly readable for a book of this kind.

The narrative starts with Jonas Stark's mother and her efforts to protect her child from the polio epidemic in the summer of 1916. It continues with Stark's education, his internship under his mentor, his work on a flu vaccine, and finally his efforts to develop a polio vaccine from a "dead" virus. The author chronicles the work of competing scientists as well, though more briefly, and he also gives us the story of the fledgling March of Dimes organization (created to fight polio) and other philanthropists like President Franklin D. Roosevelt whose efforts contributed to the defeat of the disease.

There's little blind praise of Dr. Salk here; he may be the hero of this story, but he's a flawed one. He blunders occasionally, just like the rest of us poor mortals, and the author doesn't flinch from describing those misakes. It certainly makes the biography more interesting than your standard "triumph of reason" book.

Kluger also does a great job describing the science in layman's terms. He intersperses human interest stories with each stage of the vaccine's development, and his descriptions of individual polio victims give that dry theory immediate importance. Less successful are the character sketches of rival scientists, Salk's assistants, and polio organization members. Though necessary to give a complete view of the struggle to eradicate polio, I found reading about all the infighting and bureaucracy incredibly tedious. It meant that I had to read the book in little snippets every night instead of devouring it in a few hours.

I thought it was a pretty good book considering that I had no prior interest in the subject. It's definitely worth reading if you are at all interested in a behind the scenes glimpse of the scientific community, if you want a picture of the climate of fear surrounding the disease in the forties and fifties, or just because you're grateful we no longer have to be scared of polio today. I know I'll say a big thank you to Dr. Salk the next time my kid gets his shots.