Born: August 26, 1906, Białystok, Poland
Died: March 3, 1993, Washington, D.C., USA
Field: Virology, immunology, medicine
Known for: Developing the oral polio vaccine
Before polio vaccination, the disease was one of the most feared threats to children around the world. It could cause permanent paralysis, respiratory failure and death. By the middle of the 20th century, polio was paralysing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Then came a scientific breakthrough that changed the fight against it.
Dr Albert Sabin developed a polio vaccine that children could take by mouth. That simple change helped make mass vaccination campaigns dramatically easier to organise.
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From Białystok to American medicine
Dr Sabin was born on August 26, 1906, in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire. His family emigrated to the United States in 1921, when Dr Sabin was 15. He eventually studied medicine at New York University, receiving his M.D. in 1931. He soon became interested in infectious diseases and began investigating viruses. Polio became the defining scientific challenge of his career.
The race to stop polio
By the 1950s, researchers were racing to develop an effective polio vaccine. American physician Jonas Salk achieved a major breakthrough with an inactivated polio vaccine, which used killed poliovirus and was administered by injection. It was licensed in the United States in 1955.
Dr Sabin pursued a different strategy. Instead of using killed virus, he worked with live polioviruses that had been weakened—or attenuated—so they could stimulate immunity without causing the disease in healthy recipients.
The result was the oral polio vaccine (OPV). WHO records that Dr Sabin’s attenuated live-virus vaccine was introduced in 1961.
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Why an oral vaccine changed the game
The scientific difference between the two vaccines translated into a major practical difference. Salk’s vaccine had to be injected.
Dr Sabin’s could be swallowed. The oral vaccine could be administered as drops and was even delivered on sugar cubes during mass vaccination campaigns. That made it particularly suited to large-scale public-health campaigns. Dr Sabin’s innovation had another important advantage. The oral vaccine could help interrupt poliovirus transmission, not merely protect the individual receiving the vaccine.
He had to test his idea on a much bigger scale
Getting the science right was only part of the challenge. With the United States already using Salk’s vaccine, Dr Sabin’s live-virus vaccine faced limited enthusiasm there for large-scale trials. He looked elsewhere. Dr Sabin developed a longstanding scientific collaboration with Soviet virologist Mikhail Chumakov. Large-scale trials followed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The vaccine that travelled
The oral vaccine’s simplicity helped it spread. Czechoslovakia became the first country to eliminate polio in 1960, and Cuba began nationwide administration of the oral vaccine in 1962.
Beyond polio
Dr Sabin’s scientific career extended beyond the polio vaccine. During World War II, he worked with the U.S. Army’s Virus Committee and contributed to vaccine research for diseases including encephalitis, sandfly fever and dengue fever.
Later, he became a major scientific and academic leader, including serving as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1970 to 1972. But his name remains inseparable from the oral polio vaccine.
The legacy of a vaccine on a sugar cube
The global fight against polio is one of the great stories of modern public health. In 1988, the World Health Assembly launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, at a time when wild poliovirus was paralysing more than 350,000 children every year in more than 125 endemic countries.
Today, polio is close to eradication, although transmission has not yet been completely eliminated. Dr Sabin’s oral vaccine became one of the central tools in that enormous global effort.
Quick facts about Dr Albert Sabin
- Born: August 26, 1906, Białystok, Poland
- Died: March 3, 1993, Washington, D.C., USA
- Field: Virology and immunology
- Known for: Developing the oral polio vaccine
- Vaccine type: Live-attenuated poliovirus vaccine
- First introduced: 1961
- Administration: Oral drops, including delivery on sugar cubes
- Major impact: Helped enable large-scale vaccination campaigns and interrupt poliovirus transmission
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