- Person
- Albert Sabin
- Lived
- 1906–1993
- Field
- Virology
- From
- Polish-American
The story
Albert Sabin was born Abram Saperstejn in 1906 in Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, to Polish Jewish parents. In 1921 his family emigrated to the United States, sailing from Antwerp to New York, and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. He became a naturalised citizen in 1930 and took the name Albert Bruce Sabin. He began studying dentistry but felt a strong pull toward medical research, earning his medical degree from New York University in 1931. His mentor William Hallock Park urged him to study polio, which was then causing thousands of cases each year in the United States.
In 1939 Sabin moved to Cincinnati, where he spent the next thirty years researching at the Children's Hospital. That year he showed that poliovirus lives and multiplies in the intestine. Jonas Salk's injected vaccine, made from killed virus and licensed in 1955, was the first to protect against polio, but it did not stop the virus from multiplying in the gut. Sabin developed a different kind: a live but weakened virus that could be swallowed, creating immunity in both the blood and the intestine.
After testing it on 10,000 monkeys, 160 chimpanzees, himself, his daughters and volunteers, Sabin proved the vaccine in vast campaigns abroad: between 1959 and 1961 millions of children received it, 77 million in the Soviet Union alone. His strains were licensed in the United States in 1961 and 1962. Economical to produce and easy to give as drops on a sugar lump, it was used worldwide from the 1960s.
Sabin did not patent his vaccine. "It's my gift to all the world's children," he said, refusing to exploit it commercially so that its price could be kept as low as possible. He gave it free of charge, did not profit from its sale, and continued to live on his professor's salary.
His oral vaccine became the mainstay of the World Health Organization's eradication drive. The last case of polio in the United States was reported in 1979. The Americas were certified polio-free in 1994, the Western Pacific Region in 2000, Europe in 2002 and South-East Asia in 2014, and Africa was declared free of wild polio in August 2020. Like any live vaccine it carries a very small risk, in rare cases reverting to a form that can cause paralysis, which is why many countries now also use injected vaccines as the end of polio approaches.
Why it matters
Sabin's cheap, easy-to-give vaccine let poor and rich countries alike vaccinate whole populations, bringing polio to the edge of global eradication.
About Albert Sabin
Białystok-born virologist whose cheap, oral polio vaccine, given on a sugar cube and never patented, became the backbone of the global drive to eradicate polio.
More about Albert Sabin
- Albert Sabin trained the scientist who unmasked RSVAlbert Sabin's Cincinnati laboratory trained Robert Chanock, his favourite “scientific son”, who later showed that RSV causes severe respiratory disease in young children.
- Albert Sabin showed polio begins in the gutBy studying the bodies of polio victims, Albert Sabin showed that the virus multiplies first in the intestine, an insight that shaped the oral vaccine he later created.
- A polio vaccine you could take on a sugar cubeAlbert Sabin's live oral polio vaccine was cheap, could be given as drops on a sugar cube, and protected the gut as well as the blood, so it stopped the virus spreading.
- Albert Sabin tested his polio vaccine on himself firstBefore asking anyone else to take his live oral polio vaccine, Albert Sabin swallowed it himself, and his family and colleagues were among the very first recipients.
- Albert Sabin fought tropical viruses for the US ArmyIn the Second World War Albert Sabin served on the Army's Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and developing early vaccines and preventive measures.
- Sabin crossed the Iron Curtain to test his polio vaccineAt the height of the Cold War, Albert Sabin shared his vaccine strains with Soviet scientists, and about 77 million Soviet children were vaccinated in 1959–1961.
- Sabin Sundays brought free polio drops to a whole cityOn Sunday, April 24, 1960, Cincinnati began handing out Albert Sabin's oral polio vaccine for free, and about 180,000 local children were soon vaccinated.
- Sabin's vaccine became the backbone of polio eradicationWhen the global drive to eradicate polio began in 1988, about 350,000 children a year were still paralysed. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine became the campaign's main tool.
Sources
- Albert Bruce Sabin (1906–1993) Emerging Infectious Diseases, CDC
- Albert Sabin Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.