- Person
- Albert Sabin
- Lived
- 1906–1993
- Field
- Virology
- From
- Polish-American
The story
In the first half of the twentieth century, polio epidemics broke out almost every summer, paralysing thousands of children and leaving some unable to breathe outside an iron lung. In 1931, the year Albert Sabin finished his medical studies at New York University, the disease was causing about 17,000 cases a year in the United States. His mentor, William Hallock Park, known for his work on a diphtheria vaccine, urged him to study it.
At the time many scientists believed poliovirus was mainly a respiratory infection that entered through the nose and travelled from there to the brain. Two attempts at a vaccine in 1934 and 1935 failed disastrously. Sabin, a young Jewish immigrant from Białystok who had trained in New York and at the Lister Institute in England before joining the Rockefeller Institute, suspected that the basic picture of how the disease worked was wrong.
He set out to test it by carrying out autopsies on many people who had died of polio, as well as on monkeys. His work showed that the virus multiplies in the intestinal tract before it is carried in the blood to the nerve cells that control the muscles. Paralysis follows when the virus invades and destroys those nerve cells. By 1939, the year he moved to the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati, he had concluded that polio was not a respiratory virus but an enteric one, living and multiplying in the gut. He also showed that it spreads both through coughs and sneezes and through faecal contamination.
That finding became the foundation of his life's work. If the virus lived first in the intestine, a vaccine that also worked in the intestine could stop people from carrying and passing it on. The injected vaccine Jonas Salk developed in the early 1950s protected individuals from paralysis but did not stop the virus multiplying in the gut. Sabin's live oral vaccine did, creating immunity in the intestine as well as in the blood.
Because it broke the chain of transmission, Sabin's vaccine could stop active epidemics, not just protect individuals. That property made it the main tool of the global campaign launched in 1988 to eradicate polio, and it began with a careful look at where the virus actually lives.
Why it matters
Understanding where polio multiplies made it possible to design a vaccine that blocks transmission, the property that later made worldwide eradication thinkable.
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 gave his oral polio vaccine free of chargeAlbert Sabin developed the oral polio vaccine, cheap and easy to give on a sugar cube, and gave it free of charge without profiting from its sale.
- 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: The Man Who Made the Oral Polio Vaccine 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.