March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation

A nonprofit organization originally established to conquer polio that since 1958 has been funding research and innovative programs to save babies from birth defects, premature birth, and low birth weight.

The March of Dimes was founded in January 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a polio victim and alarmed by decades of worsening polio epidemics, established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. At the time, comedian Eddie Cantor coined the phrase “March of Dimes” (playing on the popular newsreel feature “The March of Time”), appealing to radio listeners all over the country to send their dimes directly to the White House. The campaign was extremely successful, and over the next 17 years, the National Foundation focused on funding research to develop a vaccine against polio.

In 1948, with funding provided by the March of Dimes, Dr. Jonas Salk was able to grow the three known types of polio virus in his lab and eventually to develop an experimental killed-virus vaccine. In the summer of 1952 Dr. Salk tested the vaccine on children who had already recovered from polio. Following vaccination, the level of polio antibodies in their blood increased. The next step was to try it on volunteers who had not had polio—including himself, his wife, and their children. The volunteers all produced antibodies; none got sick. By 1954 nationwide testing of the vaccine inoculated nearly two million schoolchildren. Statistics showed that the Salk vaccine was 80 percent to 90 percent effective in preventing polio.

In the next four years 450 million doses of the vaccine were administered, and it became a standard fixture among childhood immunizations. Later, in 1962, an oral polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, with funding from the March of Dimes, was licensed.

With the virtual elimination of polio as a childhood epidemic, the National Foundation officially changed its name to the March of Dimes in 1979.