Polio Quotes

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate ... Choose science. ~ Carl Sagan

A deranged person is supposed to have the strength of ten men.
I have the strength of one small boy ... with polio. ~ Woody Allen

We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio? ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

Because I could dance, my folks went through hell so I could be in movies. But I didn't dance in pictures. I cried! At one point I had polio, which I believe was a result of the stress I felt in the studios. ~ David Holt

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Vic Wertz once hit a ball rather famously that was later described as such: 'It would have been a home run in any other park - including Yellowstone.' Instead, he's remembered as the guy who got robbed by Willie Mays' spectacular catch during the 1954 World Series between the Indians and the Giants, a play that remains one of the game's all-time greatest defensive efforts. What people often forget about Wertz is that his greatest battle wasn't that one at bat, and that one out never defined his career. He was stricken with polio in 1955, and after 74 games his season was over and his career was hanging in the balance. 'The Catch' by Willie Mays couldn't keep him down, and neither could polio - he came back in 1956, and despite playing in only 136 games he belted 32 home runs with 106 RBIs. ~ Tucker Elliot

We're all responsible for creating a polio-free world while we still can. ~ Bill Gates

I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country's civil war in the late 1960s. ~ Uzo Aduba

The concern scientists had regarding passenger viruses was not unfounded. You may recall the disastrous SV40 monkey virus which contaminated the polio vaccines. There are scientists who claim this virus is the cause of multiple human cancers. On CDC's website a page on vaccine safety, which was suddenly removed (archived copies exist), states that: "SV40 virus has been found in certain types of cancer in humans, but it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers. ~ James Morcan

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there. ~ Bill Gates

We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth. ~ Mary Calderone

Polio has not been eradicated by vaccination, it is lurking behind a redefinition and new diagnostic names like viral or aseptic meningitis ... According to one of the 1997 issues of the MMWR, there are some 30,000 to 50,000 cases of viral meningitis per year in the United States alone. That's where all those 30,000 - 50,000 cases of polio disappeared after the introduction of mass vaccination ~ Viera Scheibner

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. ~ Colin Powell

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:
It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe. ~ Jonas Salk

I had a series of childhood illnesses ... scarlet fever ... pneumonia ... Polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn't like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports. ~ Wilma Rudolph

Somebody bought me a Snuggie as a joke gift. Haha, the joke's on you, I enjoy it. I toss and turn at night, finally a blanket that's like, 'I'm going to keep you warm.' It's like having a small child with polio keep you in a full nelson - the perfect pressure. ~ Daniel Tosh

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. ~ David Sedaris

Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

One of the interesting takeaways from both the Antonine plague and polio is what a difference a strong leader can make during an epidemic. Marcus Aurelius's swift response to the Antonine plague - and his attempt to help cover expenses for the general populace and rebuild the parts of the army decimated by the disease - staved off the fall of the Roman Empire, at least temporarily. When FDR took up polio as a cause, America followed his lead and went to work eradicating it. Although his role may not have been as significant, Eisenhower is also to be commended for trying to ensure that cost did not prohibit any child from receiving the polio vaccine, and that the vaccine was shared with the world. Those men each acknowledged the seriousness of their crises and went about bravely confronting the disease in their midst head-on. They did not ignore it or glamorize it or shame people for having it, because that never works. That strategy just gives diseases more time to multiply and kill people. Diseases are delighted when you refuse to take them seriously. ~ Jennifer Wright

But cancer can also be fun with its luncheons, theatre parties, and fund raising luaus ... What will they all do if a cure comes out of it? Considering how easily the March of Dimes conglomerate shifted gears after the polio vaccine, it should pose no problem. ~ Edgar Berman

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result. ~ Philip Roth

Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want ... but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy ... try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science. ~ Carl Sagan

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio. ~ Melinda Gates

I am no saviour. I'm absolutely the last person on the planet who can practically help. I don't know how to make the different types of therapeutic feeding milk. I'm no chemist. I'm no doctor. I'm no engineer. I can't manufacture polio vaccines or organise their transportation to the health centres in Saramoussayah or Bissikirima. I can't build schools, or design drainage systems. I can't provide the women and children of Mandiana with water.All I can do now is help make people aware of what is happening, of what they are doing. That is all that I can do. For now. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas. ~ Bill Gates

I was a shy ugly kid who led a big fantasy life. I thought I was an angel sent from heaven, to cure polio. When Dr. Salk did that I was really pissed off. ~ Cher

I am more connected to the world of the imagination, but you don't have to have polio to do that. ~ Ben Lewin

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

Every day in the United States, seventeen children are killed by gunfire. That's about 6,000 children each year who are killed by guns, as compared, for example, with about 3,000 a year who died at the height of the polio epidemic of the 1950s. We rose up as a society to fight against polio. Why do we not act more forcefully to halt today's even greater scourge? ~ Jimmy Carter

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me. ~ Helen Gurley Brown

So, obviously, autism - which is the key in this - is a very big problem. We need more studies about it. We certainly have to try to figure out what causes it and why and do something about it. But to tab it to vaccines, I think, is a real mistake. Not only is there no evidence, but what it leads to is larger numbers of unvaccinated children. And that's not only a problem for polio. It's a problem for a wide range of vaccine-preventable diseases. ~ David Oshinsky

The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back ... ~ Christopher Hitchens

Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now? ~ Geoffrey Canada

Superstition, she said. Soup with a bonobo finger in it is supposed to make a pregnant woman give birth to a strong baby. Putting another finger in the bathwater keeps the baby strong. "I hope the stupid polio", I said, and surprised myself by even sort of meaning it. I kissed the top of the bonobo's head. I imagined him in his crate, crying against the bars, someone lifting him out only to chop off a finger. Plunging him back into the crate, then pulling him out a few days later to take another ... ~ Eliot Schrefer

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland. ~ Haruki Murakami

I have studied the effects of our new lots of polio vaccine in 100 adult volunteers and during the next few days shall give it to my wife and 2 children as well as to our neighbors and their children. ~ Albert Sabin

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases. ~ Bill Gates

I went to several different grade schools all over the West Coast. I got polio when I was 8 and spent eight months in the hospital and a rehab clinic in Seattle. ~ Dennis Washington

I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it. ~ Michael Sandel

Provocation polio. That is the truth about those outbreaks of polio. And I offer a well considered personal opinion that polio is a man made disease. ~ Viera Scheibner

We try, we struggle, all the time to find words to express our love. The quality, the quantity, certain that no two people have experienced it before in the history of creation. Perhaps Catherine and Heathcliff, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Hero and Leander, but these are just characters, make-believe. We have known each other forever, since before conception even. We remember playing together in a playpen, crossing paths at FAO Schwarz. We remember meeting in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember greeting each other at the Forum, at the Parthenon, on passing ships as Christopher Columbus sailed to America. We have survived pogrom together, we have died in Dachau together, we have been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan together. There has been cancer, polio, the bubonic plague, consumption, morphine addiction. We have had children together, we have been children together, we were in the womb together. Our history is so deep and wide and long, we have known each other a million years. And we don't know how to express this kind of love, this kind of feeling. I get paralyzed sometimes. One day, we are in the shower and I want to say to him, I could be submerged in sixty feet of water right now, never drowning, never even fearing drowning, knowing I would always be safe with you here, knowing that it would be ok to die as long as you are here. I want to say this but don't. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I consider myself incredibly lucky to live and work in places like Canada and the U.S. where polio no longer threatens to rob the livelihoods of innocent children. As a young woman, I stand behind the women around the globe who are leading the charge against polio and working relentlessly to achieve a polio-free world. ~ Ksenia Solo

A lot of people like to think that polio was a inspiration in what I do. I think that music has to do with what kind of passion do you have. ~ Itzhak Perlman

When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don't sleep well for two or three months. ~ Jonas Salk

Fear is the polio of the soul. Faith is the life based on unseen realities; it is the word become flesh. ~ Clarence Jordan

Fear is the polio of the soul which prevents our walking by faith. ~ Clarence Jordan

The work on [polio] prevention was long delayed by ... misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys ~ Albert Sabin

That is why we have the polio vaccine. People are blazing their own trial. That is what seems to be important. I don't care to follow and to do what the mass is doing. That is not doing anything, to be doing what everyone else is doing. Everybody is unique. The funny thing about people now is that people don't really understand or really appreciate how unique each individual on earth is. ~ Henry Threadgill

Sport can be used for messaging, for example, making the connections between shin guards or a helmet that protects you, and protection in terms of HIV and AIDS. There has also been a very active program in Africa called 'Kick Polio out of Africa,' where soccer players have spoken out in terms of polio. There is also going to be a swim for malaria. ~ Carol Bellamy

Someday, scientists will discover a vaccine, a prophylactic, a cure, and people will talk about ALS the way they talk about polio. Parents will tell their children that people used to get something called ALS, and they died from it. It was a horrible disease that paralyzed its victims. Children will vaguely imagine the horror of it for a moment before skipping along to a sunnier topic, fleetingly grateful for a reality that will never include those three letters. ~ Lisa Genova

We're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it. ~ Jack Finney

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial ...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. ~ Betty Friedan

A huge meringue with polio who drives everywhere in a beautifully restored Hillman Imp. ~ St John Morris

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. ~ Billie Holiday

Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio. ~ Philip Roth

In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary. ~ Neil Young

I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved. What if his words had the effect of polio on me? What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man. ~ Yann Martel

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning... ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with?

America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag.

And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.

Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now ~ Bill Maher

Even to this day, the government, the FDA is refusing to use the sophisticated biotechnology to evaluate the contaminants in the vaccines such as the polio vaccines that they are administering. I think (people) would be appalled that some of the vaccines that are currently being used are still laced with viruses. ~ Leonard Horowitz

Historically , when we look back to the development of science in all of its characteristics & dimensions; there is a huge difference between now and centuries ago that human beings were struggling with some diseases such as polio, cholera, typhoid fever and a dozen of contagious diseases that threatening human life. Nowadays if we can see healthy children and even people , we should be grateful about those scientists who brought health to us and give us the ability of controlling those horrible diseases in todays world. This kind of ability caused us to see health and happiness more than those times in human beings. Thanks god for those wonderful people. ~ Zahra Azari

When I think of cancer prevention, I think of cancer vaccines, but I think more broadly of all that we can do to prevent cancer. And part of that is coming up with a vaccine that will work like the vaccines we have for hepatitis B or flu or polio. ~ Laurie Glimcher

Our understanding of evolution came to us by exactly the same method of scientific discovery that led to printing presses, polio vaccines, and smartphones. ~ Bill Nye

Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted polio). She roused people to excitement at mass meetings: "I'm sick an' tired o' bein' sick an' tired! ~ Howard Zinn

The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf. ~ Nigel Hamilton

My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea. ~ David Alan Grier

Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa reveals the upheaval of partition through the eyes of a child, "Lame Lenny," a young Parsi girl crippled from polio. Lenny's world is her beloved and beautiful Hindu ayah and her ayah's many Muslim admirers, the cook Imam Din, and the Untouchable gardener. ~ Nancy Pearl

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, "How did it feel to fail two hundred times?" "I never failed two hundred times in my life," Salk replied. "I was taught not to use the word 'failure.' I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio. ~ John Ortberg Jr.

There are very few issues that lie specifically in one region now. Polio in Syria doesn't affect Syria alone. I don't think any issue can ever be isolated into local politics these days, because we all know too much. ~ Cate Blanchett

Do not use intoxicants of any sort. We who should be serving the world should not ruin our health by smoking and drinking. The money we waste on these things can be used for so many useful things. With the money we smoke away, we can buy an artificial leg for one who has lost a leg, pay for an eye operation for someone with a cataract, or buy a wheelchair for a polio victim. Or, if nothing else, we can buy some spiritual books for the local library. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi

Dr.Costa then offered important clues to differentiate the syndrome from polio. in tick paralysis there is no fever, the spinal fluod is normal, the knee jerk and other reflexes are lost early, the patient is passive and apathetic, and, of course, the child has had a recent tick bite, or an attached tick is found. ~ Pamela Nagami

When Jonas Salk, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found it and developed the first polio vaccine in 1952, he did not patent the lifesaving treatment. "There is no patent," Salk told the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: "Could you patent the sun? ~ Naomi Klein

India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities. ~ Bill Gates

Where there is a confluence of interests among nations, as, for example the swine flu or polio, you can get well functioning international institutions like the World Health Organization. And you can act. Climate change is different, because the science remains hypothetical and the potential costs staggering. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7. ~ Jennifer Gardy

Quiz 1. Leeuwenhoek saw microorganisms in (a) polio sufferers (b) belly button fuzz (c) malaria victims (d) dental plaque ~ Anonymous

I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds. ~ Jack Nicklaus

I couldn't catch a ball if it had Elmer's Glue all over it. And my father had to be this ex-football star. He didn't know what to tell his friends, so he told them all I had Polio. On Father's Day, I used to limp for him. ~ Matthew West

I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles. ~ Pat Cadigan

The manager
thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for rather a long
time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse of flesh has
been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is wracking his mind
with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T., hopes that he does not try anything,
because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable.
"Make up your fucking mind," she says.
It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his ethical
conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower -- she, after all, forced him to
be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head swim -- she didn't
have to get arrested, did she? -- and so on top of everything else he's angry
with her. As if he has a right to be.
This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine? ~ Neal Stephenson

Nature is that lovely lady to whom we owe polio, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer. ~ Stanley Norman Cohen

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between. ~ Sarah Vowell

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals. ~ Albert Sabin

Viruses like symmetrical shapes because symmetry provides a very simple means for them to multiply, and that is what makes viral diseases so infectious - in fact, that's what 'virulent' means. Traditionally, symmetry has been something people have found aesthetically appealing, whether it is seen in a diamond, a flower or the face of a supermodel. But symmetry isn't always so desirable. Some of the most deadly viruses on the biological books, from influenza to herpes, from polio to the AIDS virus, are constructed using the shape of an icosahedron. Is ~ Marcus Du Sautoy

I've crippled more people than polio. ~ The Undertaker

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm ... the realm of the imagination guides my thinking. ~ Jonas Salk