Last surviving member of Salk polio team
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As the last surviving member of the team that developed the Salk polio vaccine in the 1950s, Julius Youngner was justifiably proud of his contribution to that landmark effort.
“Dr. Youngner made monumental contributions to the field of virology,” Vincent Racaniello, Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University, said in a statement. “For most, simply working with Jonas Salk on the development of the polio vaccine would be enough for a career; he also made important contributions to our understanding of the antiviral roles of interferon, cell culture and other vaccines.”
But Mr. Youngner, who died Thursday at the age of 96, never forgave Jonas Salk for his failure to acknowledge Mr. Youngner and the other members of the research team that created the vaccine against the crippling disease.
In a revealing oral history done by the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women in 1992-93, Mr. Youngner described what happened. Dr. Salk’s announcement of the success of the polio vaccine in field trials in 1955 created a sensation, he said, and the group that had funded the effort, then known as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, knew that “it was much easier to continue raising money when you have a hero, and they had an enormous public relations department that took up Jonas’ name as the hero, which he deserved.
“But in the meantime, Jonas was, how shall I say, not very generous to his colleagues and he made sure that nobody else was ever mentioned.”
Years later, Dr. Salk’s son, Peter, made efforts to recognize Mr. Youngner’s contribution — as well as the contribution of many others — to the creation of the polio vaccine.
“The really important thing to recognize is that the development of the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh was a team effort. Everyone who took part in that had a role to play, and Dr. Youngner had a significant and primary role in what was undertaken,” the younger Dr. Salk said Saturday. “I think my father recognized the importance of the team,
if there were circumstances in which that wasn’t adequately expressed, I would feel that it needs to be expressed now and very clearly so.”
While Mr. Youngner’s name was always associated with the polio vaccine breakthrough, he went on to have a distinguished career as a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. He helped discover a key immune system component known as gamma interferon, and later, his team developed a vaccine for equine influenza, saving the lives of horses around the world.
According to a statement released by Pitt, Mr. Youngner published about 200 papers and mentored dozens of students, “many of whom went on to make great contributions to the field themselves.”
“Something he very proud of was he was a great teacher and mentor,” his son, Stuart, said Friday. “He gave to his students and he spent a lot of time with his junior faculty and Ph.D. students, many of whom went on to very, very successful careers.”
Mr. Youngner was born in New York City and graduated from high school when he was 15. He went on to get his bachelor’s degree at New York University and a master’s and doctorate in microbiology at the University of Michigan. He met his first wife, Tula Liakakis, in Michigan, and they married in 1943.
During World War II, after he was drafted into the Army, Mr. Youngner worked for the Manhattan Project, testing the effects of uranium salts and plutonium on lab animals at the University of Rochester.
After a brief stint at the National Cancer Institute, Mr. Youngner came to Pittsburgh in 1949 to continue his work on learning to grow viruses in live cell cultures. That is where he met Dr. Salk, who told him he would fund Mr. Youngner’s research, as long as one of the germs he grew was the poliovirus.
Mr. Youngner first figured out a way to break down monkey cells so that the team could grow large amounts of poliovirus in the lab. Then, after the Salk group began to work on a vaccine, Mr. Youngner developed a way to inactivate the virus so it could safely be injected as a vaccine, and then developed tests to see how effective it was in the first human patients. He never intended to remain here, but “I got so involved in [the polio vaccine effort] that I decided to stay in Pittsburgh.”
His first wife died in 1963 after suffering from Hodgkin’s disease for nearly 20 years. A year later, he married his current wife, Rina Balter, who went on to become an expert in the use of industrial imagery in art. He has two children from his first marriage, Stuart, a psychiatry and bioethics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and Lisa, a ceramic and computer graphics artist in Albuquerque, N.M.