Albert Sabin

The family left Białystok — then in the Russian Empire, now Poland — sailed from Antwerp in 1921, and settled in Paterson, New Jersey, where the Polish-Jewish boy named Abram Saperstejn finished high school in a language he had arrived without. At New York University he enrolled to become a dentist and left dentistry for virology, took a bachelor's degree in 1928 and a medical degree in 1931, trained in medicine, pathology and surgery at Bellevue, spent 1934 at the Lister Institute in London, and joined the Rockefeller Institute. He became an American citizen in 1930 and took the name Albert Bruce Sabin then. In 1939 he moved to Cincinnati Children's Hospital, where he stayed for three decades.

His central finding came out of autopsies. Poliovirus settled and multiplied in the digestive tract before it ever reached the nervous system, which meant a vaccine swallowed rather than injected could stop it at the door. He built one from live weakened strains and tested it first on himself, his family and his colleagues, then at the Ohio state reformatory at Chillicothe in late 1954. Jonas Salk's killed-virus injection reached the public first, in 1955, with the March of Dimes behind it, so Sabin proved his abroad — from 1956 he worked with Soviet colleagues, and Mikhail Chumakov organized the first industrial production and the first mass use. Between 1955 and 1961 at least 100 million people took it, in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Singapore, Mexico and the Netherlands. It reached American children on sugar cubes.

The rivalry with Salk was real and it outlasted both vaccines. Sabin argued in public that an injection could not stop the virus where it actually took hold, and the licensing that followed in 1961 and 1962 made his the American standard for three decades. It did not make him money. He refused to patent the vaccine so the price would stay low, took nothing from it, and lived on a professor's salary. The Nobel Prize the work seemed to point at never came. Then in 1983 the bone of his cervical spine calcified and left him paralyzed and in severe pain. He said afterward that the experience had decided him to spend whatever life was left on the relief of pain. Surgery at Johns Hopkins corrected it in 1992, when he was 86.

He died of heart failure in Washington on March 3, 1993, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The Sabin Vaccine Institute was founded that same year and still awards a gold medal in his name. In 2000 Cincinnati renamed the street between the medical school and the children's hospital Albert Sabin Way. The honors are oddly symmetrical: the National Medal of Science in 1970, and in 1986 both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Order of Friendship Among Peoples — one from each of the two governments whose children swallowed the drops first. Polio is now close to gone from the world, and the drops are most of the reason.

Albert Sabin's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The finding that poliovirus multiplies in the digestive tract discovery
  Established by autopsy — the result that made an oral vaccine possible —
• Japanese encephalitis vaccine invention
  Developed while he was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Medical Corps —
• Oral poliovirus vaccine invention
  Live attenuated, taken by mouth, deliberately never patented 1961
• The Soviet mass trials mission
  Run with Mikhail Chumakov — at least 100 million people vaccinated by 1961 1959
• Presidency of the Weizmann Institute of Science other
  Three years at Rehovot in Israel before he returned to research 1969

• 1921 aged ~15 Sails from Antwerp with his family and settles in Paterson, New Jersey He finished American high school in a language he had arrived without.
• 1930 aged ~24 Becomes a US citizen and takes the name Albert Bruce Sabin
• 1939 aged ~33 Moves to Cincinnati Children's Hospital He worked there for three decades and headed pediatric research at the university by 1946.
• late 1954 aged ~48 Runs the first clinical trials of the oral vaccine at the Chillicothe reformatory in Ohio He had already given it to himself, his family and his colleagues.
• 1956 aged ~50 Begins four years of work with Soviet colleagues to prove the vaccine Mikhail Chumakov organized the first industrial production and mass use.
• April 1960 aged 53 Large American trials begin with 180,000 Cincinnati schoolchildren
• 1961 aged ~55 The type 1 oral vaccine is licensed in the United States Types 2 and 3 followed in 1962 and a combined vaccine in 1964.
• 1983 aged ~77 Calcification of the cervical spine leaves him paralyzed and in severe pain Surgery at Johns Hopkins corrected it in 1992, when he was 86.
• March 3, 1993 aged 86 Dies of heart failure in Washington

• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. rival
• Maurice Hilleman 1919–2005
  Virologist who developed or improved more than forty vaccines, preventing millions of deaths and transforming public health. contemporary in vaccines
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. the disease he worked on
• Drew Weissman b. 1959
  Immunologist whose collaboration with Katalin Karikó made mRNA vaccines practical and safe. later in the same work
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. campaigned against polio