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Ken Chapman & Assoc. |
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Article
Jonas Salk In 1939, a twenty-five year old man from New York City named Jonas Salk completed his training at NYU Medical School. As a boy, he had dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but somewhere between his graduation from high school and his entrance into college, his interest shifted from the laws of the land to the laws of nature. He decided that he wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps he made the switch because his mother had discouraged his pursuit of law. “My mother didn’t think I would make a very good lawyer,” he remarked years later, “probably because I could never win an argument with her.” His working class immigrant parents were proud when he graduated with his medical degree because he was the first person in his family to receive a college education. Though he chose to become a doctor, Salk’s real passion was research. He was intrigued by contradictory scientific claims by two professors which prompted him to begin studying immunology, including influenza research. And during his second year of medical school when he got the chance to spend a year doing research and teaching, he took it. “At the end of that year,” he recalled, “I was told I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition or desire which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis.” In 1947, Salk became head of the virus research lab at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he began investigating the polio virus. In those days, polio was a horrible disabling disease that claimed the lives of thousands of people every year, with children being the most frequent victims. The New York polio epidemic of the summer of 1916 left twenty-seven thousand people paralyzed and another nine thousand people dead. After that year, epidemics became common and every summer, hordes of people escaped large cities to try to protect their children. In the first half of the twentieth century, viral research was still in its infancy, but in 1948, a team of scientists at Harvard University discovered how to produce large quantities of viruses in laboratories and that made more extensive research possible. Salk capitalized on those scientists’ findings and others’ ground-breaking work and began developing a polio vaccine. After more than four years of continuous work, Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh developed a vaccine in 1952. They did some safe preliminary testing with it on people who had previously contracted polio and survived. But the true test would be injecting the vaccine, which contained inactive polio cells, into people who had never had polio. Salk had shown his dedication to helping people through years of study, preparation, and research. However, it is one thing to believe in something you are doing, and another to be totally committed to it. In the summer of 1952, Jonas Salk inoculated healthy volunteers with his vaccine. Included in that group were himself, his wife, and their three sons. Jonas Salk was total committed. Salk’s commitment paid off. The trials of the vaccine were successful and in 1955, he and his former mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis, arranged to inoculate four million children. In 1955, there were 28,985 cases of polio reported in the United States. In 1956, that number was cut in half. In 1957, there were only 5,894. Today, thanks to the work of Jonas Salk and subsequent efforts by other scientists such as Albert Sabin, cases of polio in the United States are virtually nonexistent. Jonas Salk dedicated eight years of his life defeating polio, but his real desire was to help people, which he further demonstrated by never patenting the vaccine he created. In that way, it could be used to help people around the globe. You could say that the team he was most committed to was humankind. Many people tend to associate commitment with their emotions. If they feel the right way, then they can follow through on their commitment. But true commitment does not work that way. It is not an emotion, it is a character quality that enables us to reach our goals. Human emotions go up and down all the time, but the commitment has to be rock solid. If you want a solid team, whether it is business, a ball team, marriage, or volunteer organization, you have to have team members who are solidly committed to the team. There are some things every team player needs to know about being committed. (1) Commitment is usually discovered in the middle of adversity. People do not really know whether they are committed to something until they face adversity. Struggles strengthen a person’s resolve. Adversity fosters commitment and commitment fosters hard work. And the more you work at something, the less likely you are to give up on it. The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. Committed people do not surrender easily. (2) Commitment does not depend on gifts or abilities. Sometimes when we know of talented people who are highly successful, we may be tempted to think that it is easier for them because of their talent. It seems as if it might be easier for first-rate athletes to practice or skilled artists to refine their craft, and natural business people to work at their businesses. But that is not true. Commitment and talent are unconnected, unless you connect them. Have you ever known a highly talented person who squandered their potential because they would not do anything? And do you know people with less talent who are quite successful. That is often due in part to commitment. You do not need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need to use is what we have. If we will commit ourselves to using what talent we have, we will find that we have more talent and more to offer our team as a result of our commitment. (3) Commitment comes as the result of choice, not condition. When it comes right down to it, commitment is always a matter of choice. Most people look back over the years to identify a time and a place which changed their lives significantly. Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and in collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live, and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives. Far too many people think that conditions determine choices. More often, choices determine conditions. When you choose commitment, you give yourself a chance for success. (4) Commitment lasts when it is based on values. It is one thing to make a commitment in a moment, it is another to stick with it. Will we remain committed? The answer lies in what we base our commitments on. Any time we make choices based on solid life values, then we are in a better position to sustain our level of commitment because we do not have to continue to reevaluate its importance. It is like settling the issue before it is tested. A commitment to something we believe in is a commitment that is easier to keep. We need to ask ourselves how important is commitment to us? Are we someone who values loyalty and follow-through? If things get tough, are we in the habit of standing firm? Or, do we have a tendency to compromise or even quit? More specifically, how committed are we to our team? Is our support solid? Is our dedication undeniable or are we tentative in our level of commitment? If we find ourselves reevaluating our intention to stay with the team whenever we and our teammates face adversity, we may need to become more committed. Commitment is a choice. It is not an accident. For more information about Ken Chapman and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman at 205.366.0265 or email Ken at kchapman@leaderscode.com. <End> |
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