He wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm.
It's like what they did with salk, or what google did.
Salk was only taking the next logical step in the journey begun by Morgan and others. None of those who had established the principles and the practices upon which the
Although the publicity must have been a factor, the real reason Jonas Salk was never fully accepted by those whom he would have liked to consider his peers is simply that the scientific quality of his contribution was not thought to be great. When a Nobel Prize was to be awarded for the solution of the polio challenge, it went not to Salk but to John Enders, Thomas Weller and Fred Robbins, who had enormously magnified the field's potential by devising the method of growing the virus in a culture medium other than nervous tissue, a magnificent achievement without which continuing research progress would not have been possible. Even the distinction of being elected to the National Academy of Sciences eluded Jonas Salk because that pantheon of investigators did not think his career merited it.
Compared to establishment figures such as Enders, Francis, Paul and Sabin, Salk was a Jonas-come-lately. His only previous noteworthy contribution was his work with Francis on an inactivated-virus influenza vaccine. Since the basis for his polio studies had been so well constructed by others, it was felt by those close to the field that Salk had overcome no great obstacle. In later years, his bitter rival Sabin would tell the medical historian Saul Benison, "You could go into the kitchen and do what he did." Despite the flagrant exaggeration of Sabin's comments, they seemed to echo the sentiments of other scientists as well.
There was far more at work here than the mere absence of high regard for a colleague's work. The fact is that the weight of scientific opinion in the late 1940s and the '50s favored the search for a vaccine made from live but attenuated, or "weakened," virus. The inactivated or "killed" variety that Salk developed is more difficult to administer and would confer a degree of immunity far less lasting. An attenuated virus vaccine produces mild subclinical infection in those to whom it is administered, as well as the likelihood that it will spread, like any contagious disease, to the non-treated population. Thus, many who have not been immunized develop antibodies that protect them against the disease.
