Dr. Peter Salk was just 9 in May of 1953 when his father, Dr. Jonas Salk, came home with glass syringes and needles, which he boiled on the stove, and then lined up his three sons and wife to give them a then-experimental polio vaccine. The vaccine trials had not yet begun on a wider scale. “I hated injections,” said Peter Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. “And the thing that marked that occasion in my mind … that day, the needle must have just missed all the nerves. I didn’t feel it. And then that’s just sort of frozen that experience in my mind. I can see being there in the kitchen, the kitchen table, the light coming in the window and so on.”

Photo Credit: John Dillard/UPMC