Hilary Koprowski (5 December 191611 April 2013) was a Polish virologist and immunologist active in the United States who demonstrated the world's first effective live polio vaccine. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals. Koprowski received many academic honors and national decorations, including the Belgian Order of the Lion, the French Order of Merit and Legion of Honour, Finland's Order of the Lion, and the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. Koprowski was the target of accusations in the press related to the "oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis", which posited that the AIDS pandemic originated from live polio vaccines such as Koprowski's. This allegation has long been refuted by evidence showing that the human immunodeficiency virus was introduced to humans before his polio-vaccine trials were conducted in Africa. The case was settled out of court with a formal apology from Rolling Stone magazine. Life Hilary Koprowski was born in Warsaw to an educated, assimilated Jewish family. His parents met in 1906 when Paweł Koprowski (1882–1957) was serving in the Imperial Russian Army, and moved to Warsaw soon after their marriage in 1912. His mother Sonia (née Berland; 1883–1967), was a dentist from Berdichev. Hilary Koprowski attended Warsaw's Mikołaj Rej Secondary School, and from age twelve he took piano lessons at the Warsaw Conservatory. He received a medical degree from Warsaw University in 1939. He also received music degrees from the Warsaw Conservatory and, in 1940, from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He adopted scientific research as his life's work, but never gave up music and composed several musical works. In July 1938, while in medical school, Koprowski married Irena Grasberg. In 1939, after Germany's invasion of Poland, Koprowski and his wife, likewise a physician, fled the country, using Koprowski family business connections in Manchester, England. Hilary went to Rome, where he spent a year studying piano at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory; while Irena went to France, where she gave birth to their first child, Claude Koprowski, and worked as an attending physician at a psychiatric hospital. As the invasion of France loomed in 1940, Irena and the infant escaped from France via Spain and Portugal —where the Koprowski family reunited — to Brazil, where Koprowski worked in Rio de Janeiro for the Rockefeller Foundation. His field of research for several years was finding a live-virus vaccine against yellow fever. After World