Sabin, Albert Bruce

Albert Bruce Sabin, (born Aug. 26, 1906, Białystok, Poland, Russian Empire—died March 3, 1993, Washington, D.C., U.S.), Polish American physician and microbiologist best known for developing the oral polio vaccine. He was also known for his research in the fields of human viral diseases, toxoplasmosis, and cancer.

Sabin immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1921 and became an American citizen nine years later. He received an M.D. degree from New York University in 1931, where he began research on human poliomyelitis. After serving for two years as a house physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, he attended the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London. In 1935 he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, where he was the first researcher to demonstrate the growth of poliovirus in human nervous tissue outside the body.

In 1939 Sabin became associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio and chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital Research Foundation of the college. He later became professor of research pediatrics. While at the college, he disproved the prevailing theory that the poliovirus enters the body through the nose and respiratory system; he subsequently demonstrated that human poliomyelitis is primarily an infection of the digestive tract.

Sabin postulated that live, weakened (attenuated) virus, administered orally, would provide immunity over a longer period of time than killed, injected virus. By 1957 he had isolated strains of each of the three types of poliovirus that were not strong enough to produce the disease itself but were capable of stimulating the production of antibodies. He then proceeded to conduct preliminary experiments in the oral administration of these attenuated strains. Cooperative studies were conducted with scientists from Mexico, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union, and finally, in extensive field trials on children, the effectiveness of the new vaccine was conclusively demonstrated. The Sabin oral polio vaccine was approved for use in the United States in 1960 and became the main defense against polio throughout the world.

Sabin also isolated the B virus, conducted research that led to the development of vaccines for sandfly fever and dengue, studied how immunity to viruses is developed, investigated viruses that affect the nervous system, and studied the role of viruses in cancer.

Sabin became professor emeritus at Cincinnati in 1971, and from 1974 to 1982 he was a research professor at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.