Jonas Salk

His mother, Dora Press, came from Minsk at twelve. The Jewish quota touched him directly: he went to the NYU School of Medicine precisely because it did not operate one, while Yale, Cornell and Columbia did. A figure for scale: in 1935 Yale admitted seventy-six of five hundred and one applicants, of whom two hundred were Jews—five got in.

The famous answer to Edward Murrow in April 1955: "Who owns this patent?"—"Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" And here a correction is needed: the National Foundation's lawyers had already established that the vaccine was not patentable on prior-art grounds—so the refusal was morally real and legally moot. The "seven billion in forgone earnings" is a later guess. He never won a Nobel Prize, and was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences.