New Delhi: Dr Jonas Salk is standing on a street with cheerful children playing around him. Two kids hold up a placard saying, "Thank you Dr Salk", in the Google doodle commemorating the birth centenary of the person credited with developing the first effective polio vaccine.
The American physician, virologist, and immunologist was born in New York City on October 28, 1914.
Salk initially studied to be a lawyer but later changed his mind and enrolled in the College of Medicine at New York University from where he graduated in 1939.
He later worked at the University of Michigan where he helped develp a flu vaccine.
Salk started his research on developing a polio vaccine in 1947 and the 1949 discovery that there were three distinct types of polio viruses gave his research a new direction. The vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was determined safe for general use in 1955.
Dr Salk's work led to the eradication of the dreaded polio in the United States and also from most parts of the world. Jonas Salk died of heart failure on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, California, at the age of 80.
While polio was a worldwide scourge, the Jonas Salk Google doodle is curiously visible on the Google home pages in only select countries.
Of the three countries in the world, where polio is still endemic, the doodle appears only on the Nigeria home page and not on that of Pakistan or Afghanistan.
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