Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk   (virologist, medical researcher)
Born	October 28, 1914 New York City, U.S.
Died	June 23, 1995 (Age 80) La Jolla, California, U.S.
Nationality	US
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	City College of New York, New York University School of Medicine
Spouse	• Donna Lindsay • Françoise Gilot
Much lionized medical researcher

Jonas Edward Salk was an American virologist and medical researcher known for his polio vaccine which was given to hundreds of millions of children. "But he didn’t quit there. Later in life, he would outline ways to save the planet from overpopulation."

Official narrative

In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he undertook a project beginning in 1948 to determine the number of different types of poliovirus. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself to developing a vaccine against polio. Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.

Overpopulation

Salk, who was hired by the UN to compile a report on overpopulation, advocated for Malthusian population control as a necessary condition of conscious evolution.

In his 1972 book, Man Unfolding, Salk advocated that humankind must "unlearn" its traditional philosophies" while "consciously evolving "new systems of "values and "rules that will "bring about a measure of control over growth both of population and of greed in man, excesses of each of which might be thought of as cancers of man." In a chapter titled Health as Wholeness, Salk posited that, in order to avert ecological "damage that may be irreparable," the cancers of overpopulation and overconsumption must be excised by pushing the human species to "move consciously to form an organism of mankind as part of an eco-system related to a purpose."

In Survival of the Wisest, Salk compared the Malthusian forecasts projected by Paul Ehrlich with population data calculated by eugenicist Raymond Pearl. Salk speculated that the "future population growth in Man will tend to stabilize at an optimal level described by an S-shaped curve," but warned that "[a] major threat to the species is attributed to the increasing size of the human population" and that the diagrams explicated in Survival of the Wisest "also show that former attitudes in respect to growth in population can no longer continue. Now self-imposed restrictions of freedom in this respect will be necessary not only to preserve other freedoms but to keep the quality of life from falling to a level that would soon become intolerable."

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