INTRODUCTION
The Jonas Salk Memorial Fund was established in 1996 to manage his family's extensive collection of papers and artifacts, license his intellectual property and provide resources for students, researchers and professional writers. Its website (The Jonas Salk Center) was established in 2004 as an online presence and in 2025 was updated and expanded to the current Jonas Salk Legacy Gateway.
The Jonas Salk Legacy Fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation was created in 2025 to support archival programs, historical research and scientific analysis of laboratory specimens from the development of the Inactivated (Killed) Poliovirus Vaccine (KPV) by Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1950s. The activities supported by the Fund will extend to protecting and promoting Jonas Salk’s life legacies beyond the polio vaccine: the establishment of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies; the standardization of a single-dose, high potency KPV; his novel approaches to the vaccinology of cancer, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS; his metabiological writings; his commitment to Global Health and his humanitarianism.