On the evening of April 12, 1955, sitting under studio lights across from Edward R. Murrow on See It Now, Jonas Salk was asked a simple question about the polio vaccine he had just spent seven years developing. Who owned the patent? According to widely reported accounts, when asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Salk responded that there was no patent and asked rhetorically whether one could patent the sun. The exchange, verified in the Slate account of the broadcast, went out live to a country that had, that same day, been told the shot was safe and effective against paralytic polio.
The decision cost Salk an estimated seven billion dollars in forgone personal wealth. He never seemed to mind. Within a decade, vast numbers of children had rolled up their sleeves for a vaccine whose formula was essentially open source.
The disease the country was terrified of
To understand the shape of that answer, you have to understand what polio was doing to American childhood. In the years just before the vaccine, poliomyelitis paralyzed thousands of children in the United States every year. Iron lungs lined hospital wards. Public swimming pools emptied every summer. Parents kept children indoors in August the way people now watch wildfire smoke maps.
The virus spreads through the fecal-oral route and has no cure — treatment then, as The Better India summarized in its history of India’s polio fight, meant managing symptoms and hoping the paralysis did not reach the muscles that pull air into the lungs.
Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, began his vaccine research in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s he had an experimental trivalent solution targeting all three known strains of the virus. He tested it first on himself, his wife, and his three sons.
The largest medical field trial in history
The 1954 field trial was not a small operation. Millions of American schoolchildren across dozens of states — the “Polio Pioneers” — received either the Salk vaccine, a placebo, or nothing at all. Hundreds of thousands of them were actually inoculated. Their teachers, parents, and family doctors submitted paperwork. Public health officials tracked every case.
The money for all of this did not come from a pharmaceutical company. It came from dimes. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis — the organization the country would come to know as the March of Dimes — collected donations from tens of millions of Americans in the years leading up to the vaccine announcement. The foundation’s annual budget had grown substantially in the years leading up to the trial. Walt Disney’s cartoon characters recorded anti-polio songs. Schools ran coin drives.
By the time Murrow asked his question, the public had already, in a very literal sense, paid for the vaccine. Patenting it for profit would have amounted to charging them twice.
The line about the sun
The sentence itself has become one of the most quoted moments in the history of American science. It is short, it is rhetorical, and it makes a moral argument in the form of a question. It has been carved onto plaques and printed on posters and repeated by every generation of medical students since.
The reality behind the line is a little more textured than the myth. Lawyers for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had in fact looked into a patent application before the interview, according to documents unearthed by Jane Smith, author of Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine. They concluded the vaccine would not clear the novelty bar required by U.S. patent law. There was no patent partly because Salk and his backers didn’t want one, and partly because the lawyers weren’t sure they could get one.
The foundation had also already handed the formulation and manufacturing processes to several pharmaceutical companies at no cost. The question of whether to profit from the shot was, internally, already settled before Murrow’s cameras rolled.
What seven billion dollars looks like
The $7 billion figure is an estimate, not an audit. Analysts have run the arithmetic in different ways: royalty streams on hundreds of millions of doses, licensing fees from foreign manufacturers, the market capitalization Salk’s name alone could have supported. Even the low-end estimates run into the low billions. Salk turned down an enormous fortune, in a single sentence, on live television.
He was not a poor man afterward — the Salk Institute in La Jolla was built with foundation and philanthropic support, and he continued to draw a scientific salary — but he never became a Howard Hughes-style pharmaceutical baron. He didn’t seem to want to.
What the decision actually made possible
Because the formulation was freely shared, foreign governments could license production almost immediately. The Soviet Union manufactured its own supply. So did Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and dozens of other countries. By the early 1960s, when Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine began to supplement the Salk injection, hundreds of millions of children had received one shot or the other.
India tells the story in miniature. In the late 1970s, the Indian government began mass polio vaccination under a national program that expanded coverage over subsequent years. The Universal Immunization Program, launched in the mid-1980s, pushed coverage to high levels. Reported cases fell dramatically from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The Pulse Polio Program, launched in the mid-1990s and fronted by Amitabh Bachchan, drove the numbers toward zero. The last wild polio cases in India were recorded in West Bengal and Gujarat in early 2011. On March 27, 2014, the World Health Organization declared India polio-free — a country with hundreds of millions of children, cleared of a virus that had crippled generations.
None of that scale-out would have been legally straightforward if a single American drug company held exclusive rights.
The critique that came later
Salk’s answer has aged into something like scripture for critics of pharmaceutical pricing. It came up during the AIDS crisis, during the Hepatitis C sofosbuvir debate, and again during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, when governments argued over waiving intellectual property protections on mRNA shots. The rhetorical descendant of Salk’s line — could you patent the sun? — is embedded in every one of those fights.
Salk’s own position turned out to be less absolute than the quote suggests. Near the end of his life he helped found a company to develop an HIV vaccine, and that company filed patent applications on the early candidates. The vaccine failed in trials, but the paperwork was real. The man who had asked whether you could patent the sun understood, by the 1990s, that the machinery of modern drug development ran on financial incentives whether he liked it or not.
What made 1955 different was that the polio vaccine had been built almost entirely outside that machinery. A nonprofit had funded the research. Millions of ordinary donors had paid for the trials. Universities had done the science. There was no venture capital to reward, no shareholder to answer to, no board demanding a return.
The scientist and the moment
Salk was born in 1914 in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant garment workers. He died in 1995 in La Jolla. Between those dates he became, briefly, the most famous doctor on Earth — mobbed on the street, thanked in church sermons, sent letters by parents whose children had been spared. The Murrow interview happened at the peak of that fame, six hours after the University of Michigan announced the trial results.
At a March of Dimes commemoration, Salk’s son described how the vaccine helped bring the epidemic under control, noting that polio had once killed or paralyzed thousands annually. At a March of Dimes commemoration, Salk’s son noted that the world was approaching complete eradication of the polio virus.
The Long View has written before about scientific moments that pivot on a single decision or dream — Kekulé’s dream of the benzene ring being one of them. Salk’s line to Murrow is another. Both took a matter of seconds. Both reshaped what came after.
What the shot looks like now
Global wild poliovirus cases have fallen more than 99 percent since 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative launched. Only two countries — Afghanistan and Pakistan — still report endemic transmission of wild type 1. The Salk inactivated vaccine, updated but recognizably the same design, remains part of the routine childhood schedule in most of the world. Manufacturing runs at scales Salk could not have imagined: the same industrial base now produces hundreds of millions of doses a year of dozens of different shots.
The April 12, 1955 press event drew a bigger radio audience than most presidential addresses of the era. Church bells were rung. Factories paused production. The wire services sent bulletins the way they would have for the end of a war.
And on that same day, in a television studio, a virologist looked at a journalist and gave away, in one sentence, more money than most people will ever see. The vaccine went into hundreds of millions of arms. The dimes had done their work. Somewhere in the archive, a copy of the tape still exists — the pause, the small smile, the question that answered itself.