SABIN, Albert Bruce

(b. 26 August 1906 in Bialystok, Russia [now Poland]; d. 3 March 1993 in Washington, D.C.), virologist who developed the first polio vaccine offering lifelong protection against the disease.

Sabin was the son of Jacob Sabin and Tillie Krugman, and was fifteen years old when his family immigrated to the United States, where his father worked in the textile business. Sabin graduated from Paterson High School in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1923 and earned his B.S. degree from New York University (NYU) in 1928. He then enrolled in medical school at NYU, where he earned his M.D. degree in 1931. He performed his residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

In 1932, while still an intern, Sabin isolated the B virus from the body of a colleague who had suffered a fatal bite from a monkey, and was able to prove the relationship between the B virus and the herpes simplex virus. Following one year at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London from 1934 to 1935, Sabin accepted a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he became deeply involved in research regarding poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio. Working with Peter K. Olitsky, Sabin in 1936 proved that polio was primarily an infection of the alimentary tract, thus opening up the possibility of an oral vaccine.

During World War II, Sabin served with the virus committee of the U.S. Army Epidemiological Board, earning the rank of lieutenant colonel. From 1939 to 1943, he had worked as an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Children's Hospital Research Foundation, and in 1946 he returned as a professor of research in pediatrics at the same institution. He spent the next decade working on a polio vaccine, concentrating on the isolation of a mutant, avirulent (harmless) form of the virus that would displace the more common virulent strains in the alimentary tract.

In 1954 Jonas Salk developed his own polio vaccine, which used a killed form of the virus (which could revert to a virulent state), and had to be supplemented by regular booster shots. Initially accepted by the medical community with unqualified praise, the Salk vaccine suffered a setback on 26 April 1955, when five children in California contracted polio as a result of receiving vaccines containing virulent strains. At the same time, Sabin continued to develop his own vaccine, and tested it relentlessly. The first human subjects were Sabin himself, along with members of his family and his research associates; then, from 1955 to 1957, Sabin and his team administered the vaccine to hundreds of prison inmates.

Recognizing that the success of Salk's vaccine owed as much to public relations as to medicine, Sabin in the late 1950s and early 1960s set out to wage a public-relations war of his own, traveling extensively and promoting his vaccine through newspaper editorials, press releases, and speeches at scientific meetings. Then, late in the 1950s, he got the chance to prove the efficacy of his vaccine among a huge population—not of Americans, but of their cold war foes behind the iron curtain. In 1957, as the Soviet Health Ministry faced a polio epidemic that was infecting 18,000–20,000 people each year, they turned to Sabin, who in the next two years administered the vaccine to millions in the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

News of his success in vaccinating large populations helped sway opinions in the West, and by late 1959 smaller groups in Sweden, England, Singapore, and even the United States received the Sabin vaccine. In 1960 some 180,000 schoolchildren in Cincinnati were thus vaccinated, and the U.S. Public Health Service approved the manufacture of the vaccine in large quantities. Even then, however, the U.S. Public Health Administration remained reluctant, as a body, to actively support the use of the Sabin vaccine. As a result, the Salk vaccine remained dominant in the United States as a whole during 1960 and 1961.

In those years, however, Sabin found an ally in Richard Johns, a pediatrician in Phoenix who became an enthusiastic supporter of his vaccine. Launching his own personal crusade, Johns entreated the Phoenix political leadership and the county medical society, as well as the local newspapers and radio and television stations, to support a vaccination drive. On a particular Sunday, the community supplied free vaccines, with Johns and other colleagues providing their services for free as well. With the success of the first such Sunday vaccination, the city began making them a somewhat regular event, with large numbers of doctors and their assistants providing their time and expertise as a public service. Other towns began to duplicate the approach of Johns and others, and thus was born the idea of the "Sabin Sunday," a practice later applied with great success in the cities and towns of Latin America. By 1962 the tide had turned in Sabin's favor, and his method finally replaced Salk's as the vaccine of choice for the U.S. Public Health Service, which oversaw the vaccination of some 100 million Americans in the period between 1962 and 1964.

Whereas the Salk vaccine had required painful shots, the Sabin vaccine could be delivered in a much more pleasant package, a sugar cube. During the 1960s, the "Sabin sugar cube" became a symbol of public health, and the ease of administration, combined with the fact that it required no boosters and carried much less risk of infection, led to widespread international acceptance of the vaccine.

Sabin was a distinguished service professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Children's Hospital Research Foundation from 1960 to 1971, after which he continued as an emeritus distinguished professor. From 1965 until his death, he served on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot, Israel, and as president of that institution from 1970 to 1972. He also sat on the board of governors of Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1965 until his death and served as a trustee of NYU from 1966 to 1970.

In 1935 Sabin married Sylvia Tregillus; they had two children. Tregillus died in 1966, and late in the 1960s, Sabin married Jane Warner. The two later divorced, and on 28 July 1972, he married for the third and last time, to the journalist Heloisa Dunshee de Abranches.

Awards for Sabin's achievements began to roll in during the 1960s and early 1970s, when he received the Antonio Feltrinelli prize in medicine and surgical science from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome (1964), the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research (1965), the gold medal from the Royal Society of Health in London (1969), the United States National Medal of Science (1971), and the Distinguished Civilian Service medal from the U.S. Army (1973). Yet even as he continued to accrue honors, the battle of words with Salk raged.

In 1973, for instance, Salk wrote a blistering guest editorial for the New York Times in which he denounced Sabin and his method. It was true that, as use of the Sabin vaccine spread, virologists discovered that about one in 1 million children administered the Sabin sugar cube contracted the disease. Yet by 1991, there were only six reported cases of poliomyelitis in the United States, and at the time of Sabin's death in 1993, health organizations throughout the Western Hemisphere attested to the near-extinction of polio—thanks to Sabin's vaccine—in the Americas.

By the time the 1960s came to a close, Sabin had reached the age at which most people retire, but he remained as vigorous as ever, traveling the world to promote his vaccine and continuing his public debate with Salk. He also continued to work in the laboratory, devoting much of his time in the 1970s to the search for viral causes of certain types of cancer. Only in 1986, the year he earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald W. Reagan, did Sabin officially retire from medicine; but even then, he remained an active commentator on medical affairs.

Sabin died of congestive heart failure at the Georgetown University Medical School and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Following Sabin's death, Salk (who died in 1995) issued a statement praising the work of his former adversary.

As a man, Sabin presented two sides. In most social situations, he tended to be quiet, unassuming, mild-mannered, and even self-effacing. Within the laboratory and the world of virology, by contrast, he was an autocrat, and many of his colleagues described him as egotistical and possessive regarding his work. He pursued his vaccination crusade with the passion of a missionary or a political revolutionary, and was so committed to his cause that he routinely insisted on the complete safety of his vaccine, even in the face of data showing that it could sometimes cause infection. Yet the vaccine itself remains one of the great achievements of medicine during the 1960s. Thanks to Sabin, millions of children's lives were saved, and millions of children and adults were saved from the wheelchair and the iron lung.

There are no biographies of Sabin. However, aspects of his life and achievements are treated in Theodore Berland, The Scientific Life (1962); Richard Carter, Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk (1965); and Roger Rapoport, The Super-doctors (1975). Obituaries are in the (London) Guardian (4 Mar. 1993), the Lancet (13 Mar. 1993), and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association (28 Apr. 1993).

Judson Knight