Eradicate Polio Worldwide, Salk Urges : Medicine: Vaccine founder, speaking to biotechnology executives, says business leaders must work together ‘to improve the human condition.’
One day after public health officials reported that the Western Hemisphere has been free of new polio cases for more than a year, polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk on Friday urged prompt elimination of the crippling disease “in the world as a whole.”
Freeing the Americas from polio’s scourge “could have been done several decades ago,” Salk said during a rare public speech at a statewide biotechnology industry meeting in La Jolla. “And it can be done in the world as a whole. Why should it have taken this long?”
Salk, 77, who in 1963 founded the La Jolla-based Salk Institute of Biological Studies, on Friday delivered a wide-ranging keynote address to 600 biotechnology industry executives and elected officials who spent much of the day discussing the growing economic role that the industry will play in California.
Industry leaders decried government red tape, high taxes and the state’s budget crisis, but Salk instead urged them to concentrate on “working together . . . to improve the human condition.”
“Put to use the things that we already know,” Salk said, noting that polio still haunts many parts of the world despite the vaccines that were invented nearly three decades ago.
“We ought to think in terms of what can we do with what we already know, rather than what it is that’s going to (be discovered) . . . in the future,” Salk said. “The capacity we have now for solving problems is considerable.”
Salk directed academia, industry and government to “work together . . . on the common interest that we all have . . . (which is) to improve the human condition.” Too often, these sectors have thought in terms of “we and they,” Salk said. “It’s (now) very necessary to think in terms of ‘we together’ and how we can make (advancements) possible.”
“The academic community never thought about things in the real world, but we soon found out that to make things happen in the real world we do have to associate with those who make it possible for things to happen,” Salk said.
After the speech, Salk told reporters that Immune Response Corp., a Carlsbad-based company that he co-founded in 1986, is making “daily progress” on an AIDS vaccine. Salk drew worldwide attention last year when he pledged to inject himself soon with the vaccine. Salk on Friday said the planned injection has “been delayed.”
