Polio has been all but eradicated in most countries and is on track to be the third infectious disease to be wiped out from the face of the earth.
While Jonas Salk takes the credit for inventing the first polio vaccine and kick-starting the immunization campaign against the virus, Albert Sabin refined it by creating an oral vaccine that was orders of magnitude more effective and easier to administer than Salk's.
What's interesting in this story, is not the scientific one-upmanship that led to an improvement in the vaccine, but rather Sabin's dogged refusal to patent the vaccine in order to make it more affordable and more widely available to more people, resulting in polio being a distant, bad memory.
A far cry from today's big pharma and the corresponding abuses we've seen in recent times and continue to see to this day.
What cause would you consider worthy to give up filthy lucre for?