Jonas Salk was born on October 28, 1914, in East Harlem. He was just a child when poliomyelitis and then influenza devastated New York. Spared, he would one day play a major role in the prevention of both. Salk’s work on the influenza vaccine would go largely unrecognized. His polio vaccine, however, would catapult him into a world of celebrity from which he could never extricate himself. When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that his vaccine could prevent poliomyelitis, Jonas Salk became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, he had all the makings of a twentieth-century icon—a white knight in a white coat. Beloved by the public, he was shunned by the scientific community, the one group whose adulation he craved. A brilliant success at age forty, Jonas Salk had half a lifetime to prove himself.