Albert Sabin

Albert Sabin (1906-1993), American virologist, who developed an oral, live-virus poliomyelitis vaccine. Born in Białystok, Poland, Albert Bruce Sabin immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1921 and received an M.D. degree from New York University in 1931. After working at the Rockefeller Institute, he joined the staff of the Children's Hospital Research Foundation and the College of Medicine of the University of Cincinnati. Sabin spent many years in search of protective vaccines against the strains of polio viruses that had been severely crippling or taking the lives of many children, especially during epidemics from 1942 to 1953. In the mid-1950s he developed a polio virus strain that did not cause paralysis of the central nervous system in animals. Sabin's vaccine was attenuated and live, in contrast to the inactivated, injected virus developed by the American physician and epidemiologist Jonas Salk. The vaccine passed tests for which Sabin and others volunteered, and then successfully passed worldwide large-scale field tests from 1958 to 1960. After 1961 Sabin concentrated on studying the role of viruses in cancer. See Poliomyelitis.