This tale of science, competition, personalities and politics provides one a splendid base for understanding of processes of the past in order to help in understanding the present.
With my knowledge of viruses as a health care professional, I found the intersection of science with egos and policy somewhat disturbing but not surprising. According to Kluger, Dr. Salk was a selfless scientist who prioritized work above family. The book nearly slanders Dr. Sabin. I have no basis for judgment other than this book, however. This is only one side of the story.
One may find himself extrapolating to the current threat of pandemic Avian Influenza. Splendid Solution provides insight into the process, which according to NIH officials may take up to five years, whereby we may have an Avian Flu vaccine.
Drs. Salk and Sabin (with their assistants) did more than protect us from Polio. In the end, it was the combination of their discoveries that conquered Polio. The book implies that Salk's vaccine may have conquered it alone or more quickly had politics not intervened. But we will never know. We do know that the combination worked.
They laid the groundwork for our protection from threats yet unknown. They are both true American heroes.

Kluger writes a riveting account of the search for an effective immunization for an annual epidemic plaguing society through the first half of the twentieth century. He skillfully weaves the story of Salk's quest within its social background. Reading it brought me back to my childhood in the 1950's and my parents' anxieties each summer as newspapers published counts of local and national polio cases.

In 2005 the U.S. celebrates its 50th anniversary of the first national polio vaccination program which helped eradicate the disease in this country: it's hard to believe a generation is growing up without ever having known the ravages of polio. New York Times writer Jeffrey Kluger's Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk And The Conquest Of Polio is both a biography of Dr. Salk and his search for the vaccine and a social history of polio. Chapters based on exclusive interviews with his friends and colleagues and access to his private papers provides new details on Salk's life and career, setting this life in context of both his times and contemporaries.

The discovery of the polio vaccine seems a musty tale to tackle in this post-modern, giga-bitten age. But Jeffrey Kluger, a staff writer at Time magazine and coauthor with commander Jim Lovell of Lost Moon (the inspiration for the Tom Hanks movie Apollo 13), has a decent excuse: 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. Jonas Salk's breakthrough. The World Health Organization has targeted this year to eradicate the virus from the planet (a few hundred cases have lingered in Nigeria, Pakistan, and India), and the Smithsonian plans a retrospective exhibition.

Kluger nicely sketches the background for a medical achievement struck many as a miracle, and make Salk a reluctant mid-century media celebrity. When he was a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City, in 1916, more than 6,000 Americans died of polio in a year. Many more permanently lost the use of limbs. Though the numbers rose and fell, they averaged much the same for the next 40 years. Black city vehicles wrested sick children from their families and took them away to quarantine. Holiday celebrations were cancelled when the plague swept cities. Ignorance fed wild rumors such as one that blamed cats, whereupon 72,000 of them were beaten, drowned, and otherwise slaughtered by the citizens of New York.

Salk was a brilliant but odd duck. He graduated from a high school for the gifted at 15, and entered medical school by 20. During the Second World War, he was part of the team that developed the first 'flu vaccine. Detail-oriented to the point of obsessiveness, he was more polite and attentive to waiters and repairmen than peers who could do him political good.

Though muted, the story has its suspenseful turns and thrills. Competitors swear by a weakened live-virus vaccine while Salk pursues a killed-virus approach-carefully murdering yet structurally preserving the virus cells to goose the body's immune response. Test vaccines by other researchers fail, leaving dead children and ruined careers in their wake. Drug companies "improve" the vaccine Salk's team has already perfected, with procedures that lead to more polio cases. As an army of 20,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses, 1,000 support staff, 14,000 school principals and 50,000 teachers organized the 1.8 million children who would undergo the national field test in 1954, Walter Winchell's national radio broadcast called the vaccine a deadly failure, and warned that thousands of little white coffins were being readied to receive the resulting fatalities.

Slices of parallel lives punctuate the tale nicely, from the future President stricken by the disease at age 39, after which he crusades for the funding and research to battle it, to the accounts of Kluger's still-living sources: John Troan, the science reporter for the Pittsburgh Press who carefully cultivated his relationship with Salk and was rewarded with inside stories and scoops, and several interviewees who were crippled as children and participated in the first field tests.

Splendid Solution is not a heart-pounding page turner. In tone and style, it's a rather old-fashioned historical tale. But in its quiet manner, it is a terrific account, and well told.

This book is a nice quick read for those who want a simplistic history of the Salk vaccine and the America that gave birth to it.
'Solution.." is almost devoid of hard scientific explanations. The author never adequately explains why polio emerged as such a public health threat in the post-1850 West and, simliarly, he fails to set forth the means of transmissision.
Put simply--pun intended--the book displays all the pluses and minuses of the author's journalistic background.
For a really excellent book on an infectious disease written for a general audience try "And the Band Played On" about HIV/AIDS.