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50 free Jonas Salk trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jonas Salk was a Bronx-raised son of immigrants who never wanted to practise medicine, backed the "killed" poliovirus when the field favoured live vaccines, injected his own children with the result, and on April 12, 1955 became the most famous scientist in America overnight. He refused to patent it ("Could you patent the sun?"), fled the fame to build a research institute on a Californian bluff, married Picasso's former mistress and spent his last decade chasing an AIDS vaccine. This quiz covers the vaccine, the man and the myths. Easy questions ask which disease he tackled and what he told Ed Murrow about the patent. Harder ones want the school that crammed four years into three, the mentor who introduced him to virology, the first children he injected in 1952, the name given to the million children in the 1954 trial, the rival with the oral vaccine, the architect of the Salk Institute, the drug he patented for AIDS and the day named for his birthday. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Jonas Salk, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for biology teachers, medical students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Medicine, Vaccines and Famous Scientists.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which disease did Jonas Salk develop one of the first successful vaccines against?
Polio
Domestic transmission of the disease was eliminated in the United States within 25 years of the vaccine's release.
Q 02What did Salk reply when Ed Murrow asked him who owned the rights to the vaccine?
"Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
The vaccine has been calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented; lawyers found it unpatentable anyway because of prior art.
Q 03On what date was the Salk vaccine announced as safe?
April 12, 1955
The announcement made him a "miracle worker" overnight; the anniversary is marked in documentaries and celebrations.
Q 04Where was Salk born on October 28, 1914?
New York City
The family moved from East Harlem to the Bronx, with a spell in Arverne, Queens.
Q 05Where had Salk's mother Dora been born before emigrating to the United States at 12?
Minsk
His father Daniel was born in New Jersey to Jewish immigrant parents; neither had much formal education.
Q 06Which selective public academy did Salk enter at 13, where a four-year curriculum was crammed into three?
Townsend Harris Hall
It was named after the founder of City College and its motto was "study, study, study".
Q 07What career had Salk aspired to before his mother urged him toward medical school?
Lawyer
He entered City College at 15 and took a chemistry degree in 1934.
Q 08Which medical school did Salk attend, notable for not applying quotas to Jewish applicants?
New York University
Yale accepted five of 200 Jewish applicants in 1935; NYU's tuition was also comparatively low.
Q 09What did Salk say about his boyhood interests?
He was not interested in science, only in "things human"
He never intended to practise medicine, wanting to help humankind "in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis".
Q 10Which Michigan mentor introduced Salk to virology in 1941 and worked with him on a flu vaccine?
Thomas Francis
Francis had discovered the type B influenza virus while at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Q 11Where did Salk accept a professorship in 1947 and build the lab that produced the polio vaccine?
University of Pittsburgh
The lab was smaller than he hoped and the rules restrictive, but Mellon family grants let him build a real virology laboratory.
Q 12What did Harry Weaver of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis ask Salk to find out in 1948?
Whether there were more than three types of poliovirus
The typing project came with extra space, equipment and researchers.
Q 13What kind of poliovirus preparation did Salk choose, against the prevailing preference for weakened strains?
Q 21What did Salk say belonged "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary"?
Making money
The New York Times noted he had "very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people".
Q 22In which San Diego neighbourhood did the Salk Institute for Biological Studies open in 1963?
La Jolla
It sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.
Q 23Which architect designed the Salk Institute, with blackboards along the walks?
Louis Kahn
Salk imagined a "Socratic academy" where science and humanism could cross-fertilise.
"Killed" (inactivated) virus
He believed it was safer; Albert Sabin was meanwhile developing an oral vaccine from live weakened strains.
Q 14Where did Salk inject 43 young patients with his killed-virus vaccine on July 2, 1952?
The D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children
It is now the Education Center at the Watson Institute in Sewickley, Pennsylvania; he vaccinated his own children in 1953.
Q 15What were the roughly one million children in the 1954 field trial known as?
The Polio Pioneers
The project involved 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes and 7 million volunteers.
Q 16Which president founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which Salk later joined?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Publicity and fear of polio pushed the foundation's funding to $67 million by 1955.
Q 17Who developed the live oral polio vaccine that came into commercial use in 1961?
Albert Sabin
By 1959 the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries; the oral drops later became the global standard.
Q 18What did television journalist Ed Murrow tell Salk about the sudden media attention?
"Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity"
Salk found the fame appalling and talked constantly of getting back to his laboratory.
Q 19Roughly what value has been calculated for the vaccine had it been patented?
$7 billion
The foundation's lawyers concluded it was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Q 20According to journalist Jon Cohen, what would happen when Salk boarded an aeroplane?
Pilots announced him and passengers applauded
Hotels routinely upgraded him to penthouse suites and restaurant meals were interrupted by admirers.
Q 24Which co-discoverer of DNA's structure was a Salk Institute professor until his death in 2004?
Francis Crick
The institute was also the setting for Latour and Woolgar's 1979 sociology classic Laboratory Life.
Q 25What did Salk call himself in the philosophy of Man Unfolding and The Survival of the Wisest?
A biophilosopher
The New York Times called him the "Father of Biophilosophy" in 1966.
Q 26What immunologic AIDS therapy did Salk co-found a company to develop and patent in the 1980s?
Remune
The Immune Response Corporation could not secure liability insurance, and the project was dropped in 2007.
Q 27What did Salk call the universal vaccination of children against disease?
A "moral commitment"
He campaigned for mandatory vaccination for the rest of his life.
Q 28What two conditions did Salk's future father-in-law set before agreeing to his 1939 marriage?
Wait until he was an official M.D., and give himself a middle name
The wealthy dentist considered Salk "several cuts below Donna's former suitors"; hence Jonas Edward Salk.
Q 29Which French painter, formerly Pablo Picasso's mistress, did Salk marry in 1970?
Françoise Gilot
He had divorced Donna Lindsay in 1968; the marriage features in a cameo in the TV series Genius.
Q 30How many sons did Salk have with Donna Lindsay, all of whom went into medicine?
Three
Peter became a physician, Darrell worked on vaccines and genetics, and Jonathan is a psychiatrist.