A Brief History of Polio Vaccines

In 1931, Australian researchers realized that polio came in different types and that just because you had resistance to one doesn't mean you couldn't catch another. Another big advancement happened in 1941 when Dr. Albert Sabin and Robert Ward showed that polio virus wasn't just a disease of the nervous system. In 1949, John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins showed that the virus could grow on other types of tissue than nervous tissue. These three guys won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for their work.