Two years ahead of George Washington's inauguration as the first president, in 1787, the Pittsburgh Academy was founded, and you are on the campus of the university it became, one of the oldest in the United States. The University of Pittsburgh grew from that frontier academy into a major research university with particular strength in medicine, pharmacy, and public health. The university's medical school and its affiliated UPMC health system have become the dominant employer in the Pittsburgh region, filling much of the economic space that steel once occupied.
The most consequential work conducted here was Jonas Salk's development of the polio vaccine. Salk came to Pittsburgh in 1947 and worked in the basement of a building near here for six years, developing the killed-virus vaccine that ended one of the most feared diseases in human history. The vaccine was declared safe and effective on April 12, 1955, announced simultaneously to sixty-one countries.
Within two years, U.S. polio cases had dropped by 90 percent. Salk never patented the vaccine. When asked who owned it, he said: the people.
Give them the credit. He was a Pittsburgh Panther. Pittsburgh's greatest gift to the world was not steel.
It was the end of polio.