Note that the patent system did exist and he chose not to use it, so murky questions of incentivization should that system exist or not exist needn't be raised. He just chose not to enrich himself so that more people could live. 10,000 Nathan Myhrvold's couldn't fill one of this guy's shoes.
I think we have great difficulty today understanding what life was like in parts of America with epidemic breaks before there was a vaccine for polio. There were children in iron lungs for weeks.
I can't imagine anyone developing a vaccine or a cure for something like that and not simply giving it away. The breakthrough with polio doesn't compare to anything else in patentable medicine. Salk's work stands alone.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iRLtCGzuK...
The lives I'm thinking of weren't just Americans.
There were people in iron lungs for lifetimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
Like many fortunes, one made on the back of a Polio vaccine would have been made with a crime, originally...
I think Salk was too interested in simply eradicating polio to think of personal enrichment though.
How much would you want to consent to a tissue sample? Me ... I'd do it for free to help science. I think most people would consent for $100 dollars and almost everyone would consent for $1000. So that puts some numbers on the 'crime'.