1979 Dystopian Vision That Came True

I HAVE THIS recurring nightmare. Jonas Salk has just announced his cure for polio. A bill is introduced in Congress to require mandatory inoculation of school children under HEW direction. Opposition then appears. Ronald Reagan urges "free choice by parents rather than compulsion by government." Mobil runs advertisements with the headline, "From gas tanks to bloodstreams. Where will government go next?" An associate professor of economics does a study for the American Enterprise Institute dem...

 The Wonder of Curing Polio

The most compelling cases of preferring fact to fiction are the most practical. All the prayer, animal sacrifice, and chanting in the world couldn’t cure polio—the Salk vaccine did. And how did we find it? Through rigorous, skeptical, critical thinking and testing and doubting of every proposed solution to the problem of polio until only one solution was left standing. Let others find uncritical acceptance of pretty notions a wonderful thing. I’m more awestruck by the idea of ending pol...