Throughout history, Poles have contributed to science, the arts, mathematics, humanities, and many other fields. Today I want to note the death (April 11, 2013) of a Pole who made a great contribution to the field of modern health care, Dr. Hilary Koprowski. Dr. Koprowski developed the first successful oral vaccine for polio. We don’t hear much about polio today, and for that we can be thankful in large part to Koprowski, along with the more famous Jonas Salk an Albert Sabin.
A talented muscician, Koprowski was born in Poland in 1916 and studied medicine and music. Coming from a Jewish background, he fled during the war when the Nazi Germans invaded Poland and eventually went to Brazil, and finally the United States where he began his career in a pharmaceutical lab. There in 1950 he developed his oral vaccine about two years before Jonas Salk developed the injectable version (Salk was sponsored by the organization now known as the March of Dimes).
Though he was not as well known as Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, it was Koprowski’s 1950 clinical trial that was the first to demonstrate that it was possible to vaccinate against polio, the crippling and sometimes fatal disease that’s now all but eradicated, thank to the work of Koprowski, along with Salk and Sabin.
Another true hero, a son of Poland, a Polish hero. S. P., Dr. Koprowski.
