ORGANIZATION
The March of Dimes
The public fundraising organization — founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis — that funded the research, the field trials, and the production of Salk's polio vaccine through small donations from millions of ordinary Americans.
The March of Dimes was one of the most successful public health fundraising efforts in American history, and it made Salk's work possible in a specific institutional sense: it provided sustained, patient funding for research that no commercial entity would have financed on the timescale required. Roosevelt founded the organization in 1938 under its original name, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, drawing on his own experience as a polio survivor. The name 'March of Dimes' — coined by entertainer Eddie Cantor — referred to the fundraising model: small donations (often literal dimes) from ordinary citizens, accumulating into one of the largest medical research funds of the twentieth century. By the early 1950s, the Foundation was funding the basic virology research that made the vaccine possible, the 1954 field trials that tested it, and the rapid production and distribution that followed the 1955 announcement.
