From Białystok to Paterson
Albert Sabin was born Abram Saperstejn on August 26, 1906, in Białystok, then in the Russian Empire and now in Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents, Jacob Saperstejn and Tauba Krugman. Białystok was a largely Jewish textile city, and the Saperstejns were among the many Jewish families who sought a safer future across the Atlantic. In 1921, when Abram was fourteen, the family emigrated to the United States to escape the persecution of Jews, sailing from Antwerp to New York on the SS Lapland.
They settled in Paterson, New Jersey, a silk-manufacturing city with a large immigrant population, where Abram finished high school. In 1930 he became a naturalised American citizen and formally changed his name to Albert Bruce Sabin.
A compulsion for research
Sabin began university in a dentistry programme, but he later said that he “developed a terrific compulsion” to do medical research, and he switched course. He earned a bachelor of science from New York University in 1928 and his medical degree there in 1931. Shortly after he qualified, his mentor William Hallock Park, a pioneer of diphtheria immunisation, urged him to study poliomyelitis, the disease that would define his career.
After a residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York from 1931 to 1933, he spent time at the Lister Institute in London in 1934 and then joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he narrowed his focus to viruses. In 1939 he moved to the Children’s Hospital Research Foundation of the University of Cincinnati, which would be his scientific home for the next thirty years.
Understanding the enemy
In Sabin’s youth polio was one of the most feared diseases in the industrialised world. It struck mostly children, swept through towns in summer epidemics and could leave its victims paralysed for life or dependent on an iron lung to breathe. In the United States alone, the epidemic peak of 1952 brought about 21,000 cases of paralysis and some 3,100 deaths.
Sabin’s early work changed the scientific picture of the disease. By performing autopsies on many polio victims, he showed that the virus multiplies first in the intestinal tract, spreading through faecal contamination as well as respiratory droplets, before it reaches the nerve cells that control muscles. That insight would shape his vaccine. During the Second World War he served in the US Army Medical Corps on the Army’s Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying diseases such as dengue, sandfly fever and Japanese encephalitis and developing early vaccines and preventive measures; he was awarded the Legion of Merit and rose to lieutenant colonel.
A vaccine you could swallow
After 1949, when John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins showed that poliovirus could be grown in laboratory cultures of non-nerve tissue, a vaccine became feasible. Jonas Salk developed an inactivated, injected vaccine, licensed in 1955. Sabin took a different path: a live but weakened (attenuated) virus, taken by mouth, which would multiply harmlessly in the gut and produce immunity there as well as in the blood. That meant it could block transmission of the virus, not just protect the person vaccinated.
Developing safe strains of all three types of poliovirus took years of painstaking work, with thousands of monkeys and chimpanzees used in testing. The first human recipients included Sabin himself, his family and colleagues, followed by young volunteers at the federal reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio, from late 1954. American authorities, shaken by the 1955 Cutter incident, in which faulty batches of Salk’s vaccine caused paralysis, and committed to the injected vaccine, would not approve large field trials. So Sabin, at the height of the Cold War, sent his strains to the Soviet Union and worked with Soviet scientists, led by Mikhail Chumakov and Marina Voroshilova, who organised mass production and trials. Tens of millions of Soviet children received the vaccine between 1959 and 1961.
Sabin Sundays
The Soviet results provided the evidence American regulators needed. On Sunday, April 24, 1960, Cincinnati launched a mass campaign in which about 180,000 children and adults in the city and surrounding county received Sabin’s vaccine on a sugar cube in a single day; the “Sabin Sundays” were repeated across the country. The US Public Health Service licensed his strains for types 1 and 2 in 1961 and type 3 in 1962, and a combined trivalent oral vaccine followed. For the next three decades it was the polio vaccine of choice in the United States.
The vaccine was cheap to produce, could be given as drops by volunteers with no medical training, and provided strong, long-lasting immunity. Those qualities made it ideal for mass campaigns in poor countries. Its one serious drawback, acknowledged from the start, was that in very rare cases, roughly one in 750,000 doses, the weakened virus can revert to a form capable of causing paralysis, which is why many wealthy countries later switched back to the injected vaccine once polio had been eliminated locally.
The rivalry with the Salk camp was fierce. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the March of Dimes, which had funded and championed Salk’s killed-virus vaccine, opposed the switch, and Sabin had to win his case with data from abroad. Between 1955 and 1961 his oral vaccine was given to more than ninety million people in the Soviet Union, parts of Eastern Europe, Singapore, Mexico and the Netherlands, and a 1958 campaign in the Belgian Congo also produced strong results. The sugar-cube method of delivery, used to mask the vaccine’s bitter taste, became so familiar that it is said to have inspired the songwriter Robert B. Sherman’s “A Spoonful of Sugar” for the 1964 film Mary Poppins.
A gift, not a product
Sabin never patented his vaccine and did not profit from its sale, continuing to live on his salary as a professor. He insisted that it be used as widely and as cheaply as possible, and later described it simply as his gift to the world’s children. Historians note that, as with Salk, a patent might not have been legally available, since many hands had contributed to the methods involved, but Sabin’s refusal to commercialise his work, and his insistence on low prices, were real and consistent.
When the World Health Organization and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, polio was paralysing an estimated 350,000 children a year. The oral vaccine became the mainstay of the campaign. The Americas were certified polio-free in 1994, the Western Pacific in 2000, Europe in 2002, South-East Asia in 2014 and Africa’s wild poliovirus was declared eliminated in 2020. Hundreds of millions of children have been protected with vaccines descended from Sabin’s strains.
Abrasive, brilliant, apolitical
Sabin could be a difficult man. His long, public rivalry with Jonas Salk over which vaccine was better became one of the most famous feuds in twentieth-century science, and the young researchers he trained in Cincinnati had to tolerate a demanding, abrasive mentor, though some, such as Robert Chanock, who later identified the importance of respiratory syncytial virus, flourished under him. Sabin called Chanock his favourite “scientific son.”
He also believed fiercely that science should transcend politics. He collaborated with Soviet scientists at the height of the Cold War, and in 1967 travelled to Cuba to discuss scientific cooperation with Fidel Castro at a time when the two countries had no diplomatic relations. He married three times: to Sylvia Tregillus in 1935, with whom he had two daughters, Deborah and Amy, until her death in 1966; briefly to Jane Warner; and in 1972 to the Brazilian Heloisa Dunshee de Abranches.
Israel and the later years
A Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe, Sabin maintained a strong connection to the Jewish state. In the early 1970s he moved to Rehovot to serve as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel’s leading research centre; his tenure ended in 1972 when he needed emergency heart bypass surgery. He then turned to the possible links between viruses and cancer as a scholar at the National Institutes of Health and as a consultant to the National Cancer Institute, and later worked at the Medical University of South Carolina.
In 1983 he developed a calcification of the spine that left him partly paralysed and in severe pain, and he said the experience convinced him to devote his remaining years to the problem of pain. Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1992 relieved the condition. He died of congestive heart failure in Washington, D.C., on March 3, 1993, at eighty-six, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Legacy
Sabin received many of the highest honours in medicine and public life, including the Lasker Award in 1965, the US National Medal of Science in 1970, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986; the Soviet Union also honoured him with its Order of Friendship of Peoples. The Sabin Vaccine Institute, founded in 1993, continues his work, and in 2006 the US Postal Service put his face on a stamp.
His true monument is a disease almost gone. Polio, which once crippled hundreds of thousands of children every year, now survives in the wild in only a handful of places. The boy who fled Białystok gave the world a vaccine simple enough to be dropped on a sugar cube by a volunteer in a village with no doctor, and gave it away.
Sources & further reading
Albert Sabin, Wikipedia · Albert Bruce Sabin: The Man Who Made the Oral Polio Vaccine, Emerging Infectious Diseases (CDC) · The Legacy of Dr. Albert B. Sabin, Sabin Vaccine Institute · UC, Cincinnati Children’s to Host 50th Anniversary Celebration of Sabin Sundays, University of Cincinnati · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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