Frank Shimada: Canadian Researcher of Japanese Descent Who Helped Make the Salk Polio Vaccine a Reality

In 1954, several sites around the United States served as field trial sites for what would be known as the “Salk Polio Vaccine.” The vaccine was made from inactivated (killed) poliovirus, and . Six years earlier, the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories in Toronto, Canada, hired a 22 year-old man named Frank Shimada to work as an animal handler. .

Frank Shimada was born in Vancouver, Canada, to Japanese immigrant parents in 1926. As was the case with many Japanese immigrants and their children in the United States and Canada, Mr. Shimada’s family was sent to an internment camp. As his obituary in The Toronto Sun states:

“To keep most of his family together during their internment, Shimada’s father paid the government to relocate his family to what was called a “self supporting” camp on Christina Lake, a very isolated place near the U.S. border about 350 km from Vancouver. Conditions at Christina Lake were better than at other camps, but still not very good. With his high school studies curtailed, Shimada took correspondence courses to complete his diploma requirements. Studying science while interned was difficult.”

After their internment, Mr. Shimada completed a science degree from McMaster University. From there, he got the job at Connaught and proved himself a valuable member of the team researching polio. When the opportunity came to collaborate with the Americans on the Salk vaccine project, Mr. Shimada and the team jumped at the opportunity. By 1954, their “Medium 199” along with the “Toronto Method” for making large quantities of poliovirus allowed field trials to take place. By the time the results of the field trials were reported in 1955, the team at Connaught produced thousands of liters of the solution to support not just their lab, but also other labs working on producing the vaccine.

In this video, Mr. Shimada talks about his accomplishments at Connaught, where he worked for 30 years after the polio vaccine breakthrough: 

You can read more about the lab’s work on polio here:

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