Jonas Salk

Poliomyelitis was a very devastating disease in the 1940s and 1950s. The discovery that poliovirus could be grown in tissue culture enabled Dr Jonas Salk to develop and inactivated poliovirus vaccine. Thus he adopted three strains of poliovirus to monkey cell culture. The culture fluids contained live virus that were then inactivated by treatment with formaldehyde to produce and effective vaccine. The development of this vaccine and subsequently an attenuated live vaccine by Sabin, eventually brought poliomyelitis under control. It is estimated that this discovery alone saved many times more money that has ever been spent on medical research

Tizard Immunology 4th ed. p 359