So I haven't dug around to see whether anyone other than Salk willingly declaimed patenting. I am sure it is the case, though whether that was for something as potentially profitable as the polio vaccine, I don't know.

I do want to point out that there is a false sort of assumption here, though — namely that patenting is necessarily a tool for generating profit. In the 1920s and 1930s it became very common for physicists to patent their inventions, but not always because they wanted to generate private profit. In many cases, they assigned the patent to a not-for-profit organization (e.g. the Research Corporation), which then guaranteed that any royalties would be re-invested into basic research.

The reason for this is that not patenting something does not mean that somebody won't make money off of it. It just means that you won't make money off of it. The physicists had gotten "burned" a few times when they actually came up with something valuable and then other companies made a bunch of cash off of them, and nobody bothered to give their laboratories more money for more research. So this kind of patent scheme could be a way to guarantee that the fruits of science would continue to benefit science, without any aspersions about private profit.

Entirely separately, the US government adapted this model to trying to take patent brand-new inventions that were financed by government funding during World War II. The idea here was that if the government owned title, it basically made the invention "free" for licensing. It was an attempt both to make sure that the taxpayer didn't pay twice for something (e.g. the research funding and then royalties), but also to not let private companies develop patent monopolies on new fields of research that had been created by government investment (such as radar and atomic technology). This is another counter-intuitive use of patenting as a means of keeping something free as oppose to locking it up — sort of a 1940s equivalent of the modern "copyleft" concept. This was something handed down from above (specifically the brainchild of Vannevar Bush), and not all scientists were happy with it (Leo Szilard was irritated to have to sign over the patent for the first reactor; Glenn Seaborg attempted to keep the patents for plutonium production).

Patenting is a form of control, but how the control is wielded can vary quite a bit. It's not just a patenting = profit, not patenting = free sort of dichotomy, and scientists — who have had differing views towards patenting and intellectual property in science generally over the years, fueled in part by a notion that science needs to be freely shared and not tainted by money — took a number of different positions on this issue. This isn't to say that some scientists didn't want to make money (that was always an option), just that there were ways to patent that didn't involve making personal money as well.

(On patenting practices in physics, especially, during WWII, I have published at length on the subject