“You can’t get something for nothing.”
“Somebody has to pay.”
People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion.
But history has shown: you often can get something for basically nothing.
And even when somebody has to pay, that somebody doesn’t have to be you, and the amount doesn’t have to be very much at all.
In some cases, the benefits so vastly outweigh the costs that it is — for all practical intents and purposes — a free lunch.
How we eradicated Polio from the face of the Earth
In the early 1950s, the US was recovering from its worst Polio epidemic ever. Thousands of children died from this virus, and many more suffered life-long paralysis.
No one was safe from this horrible disease. Even US president Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted it at age 39. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Enter Jonas Salk, a medical researcher who had mainly studied flu viruses before turning his efforts toward Polio.
He conducted the most extensive field test ever, involving what historian Bill O’Neal says were “20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers.”
The vaccine was a success. So Dr. Salk set to work immunizing everyone on Earth. He pushed the marginal costs of the Polio vaccine as low as possible — to just the raw materials necessary — by forgoing any financial benefits his intellectual property would have brought him.
When asked about his patent, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Dr. Salk stared down a massive problem and threw himself into it with everything he could, without any aspiration for personal gain. And in the process, he and his colleagues basically wiped out one of the worst diseases ever.
Today, everyone’s life is better off as a direct result of this one massive free lunch.
“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.” —Dr. Jonas Salk
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