Albert Sabin—Conqueror of Poliomyelitis

Albert Bruce Sabin, an American virologist, developed a live virus vaccine against poliomyelitis, an acute viral disease characterized clinically by fever, sore throat, headache, and vomiting and often by stiffness of the neck and back and as well as involvement of the central nervous system, leading to paralysis and possibly death. Sabin postulated that a live, weakened (attenuated) virus, administered orally, would provide immunity during a longer period than that provided by a killed virus, the approach used by Jonas Salk (1914-1995). Sabin was born on August 26, 1906, in Bialystok in northeastern Poland (then part of Russia). In 1921, his family immigrated to the United States. From 1924 to 1926, he was a student in the College of Dentistry at New York University. However, he became interested in microbiology and shifted his course work to medicine. In 1931, he received the MD degree from New York University. During this time, he became an American citizen (1930) and was a research associate in the College of Medicine at the university (1926-1932). In 1932, Sabin was appointed house physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where he received further training in pathology, surgery, and internal medicine. In 1934, he was a fellow in medicine at the Institute of Preventive Medicine in London (England) for 1 year. Sabin returned to the United States in 1935 to become an assistant at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. While at the Rockefeller Institute, he began studies on the nature, mode of transmission, and epidemiology of human poliomyelitis. Sabin proved that human poliomyelitis is primarily an infection of the digestive tract and was the first to demonstrate the growth of poliovirus in human nervous tissue outside the body. When Sabin left the Rockefeller Institute in 1939, he had been promoted to an associate (1937). In 1939, Sabin was appointed associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio) College of Medicine and head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital Research Foundation of the college. By 1946, he was professor of research at the university, holding that title until 1960. Sabin performed his first research on human poliovirus in 1931 when he was at New York University and continued his studies in 1936 while at the Rockefeller Institute. This work was interrupted by World War II (1939-1945), when as an American medical officer he investigated American and Japanese types of insect-borne encephalitis, sandfly fever, and dengue, studies that continued for several years after the war. In 1951, Sabin resumed his studies on poliovirus and worked for many years on the production of an oral, live virus vaccine against the 3 identified strains of poliovirus. From 1954 to 1957, he worked with human volunteers in the Federal Reformatory in Chillicothe, OH. A series of cooperative studies in 1958 with investigators in the United States, Mexico, Holland, and the Soviet Union set the stage for the first field trials on hundreds of thousands of children in Malaya and Czechoslovakia early in 1959. These, in turn, led to major trials in 6,000,000 adults and children in the Soviet Union and 200,000 in Mexico. By late 1959, the vaccine was accepted as being safe by the Soviet Union. The effectiveness of the new vaccine was conclusively demonstrated. In August 1961, the vaccine was approved for use in the United States, but more than 1 year passed before it was manufactured and licensed for general distribution. Use of the oral vaccine ended the scourge of poliomyelitis, for which Sabin received many honors and awards. Sabin’s poliovirus studies led indirectly to his discovery of many new viruses in the human alimentary canal and of viruses later implicated as causative agents of such human diseases as aseptic meningitis, rare types of paralysis and encephalitis, and infantile diarrhea. Besides his work on polio, Sabin conducted research in other areas: pneumococcal infections, herpes B virus, viruses affecting the nervous system, toxoplasmosis, experimental arthritis, and the role of viruses in cancer. In 1971, Sabin became professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, and from 1974 to 1982, he was research professor at the University of South Carolina in Charleston. On March 3, 1993, at the age of 86 years, he died in Washington, DC. He was honored on a stamp (Scott No. 2467) issued by Brazil in 1994, by Mali in 1982, and by Mexico in 1987.