Albert Bruce Sabin
1906-1993
Polish-American Microbiologist
Albert Sabin is best known for his pioneering research on poliomyelitis ("infantile paralysis") and his development of an orally administered live attenuated vaccine for the prevention of the disease. Poliomyelitis is an acute viral infection that can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis. Where the disease is common, most infections probably go unnoticed, or result in mild symptoms.
Sabin was born in Bialystok, Poland. At the end of World War I, he immigrated to the United States to escape religious persecution. His family settled in New Jersey in 1921, where he attended Patterson High School. He enrolled in the dental school at New York University, but switched to microbiology. After working in Dr. William H. Park's laboratory, Sabin was admitted to the medical school of New York University. He received his M.D. in 1931, then pursued further training as an intern at Bellevue Hospital and a year at the Lister Institute in London. He was a member of the scientific staff at the Rockefeller Institute (now University) in New York from 1935 to 1939. Most of his medical career was spent at the Cincinnati College of Medicine and the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Ohio. During Word War II, from 1943 to 1946, he worked with the U.S. Army as an epidemic disease investigator. He was appointed president of the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1972. Although he left that position two years later, he remained active in various national and international medical agencies.
Dr. Park, his mentor at New York University, stimulated Sabin's interest in virology and viral diseases. One of Sabin's first successful efforts to isolate a dangerous virus occurred in 1932, when an associate at NYU died after being bitten by a laboratory monkey. The new viral agent, which was called the B virus, had caused the acute ascending myelitis. Poliomyelitis, one of the most feared epidemic diseases of the time, became Sabin's major research interest. Contrary to prevailing views about the means of transmission of the poliovirus, Sabin proved that the virus was spread by the fecal-oral route rather than the nasal route. The virus multiplied in the human intestinal tract. By 1936 Sabin and his associates had been able to isolate and propagate the poliomyelitis virus in laboratory cultures of human embryonic nervous tissues.
Although the natural history of poliomyelitis was still generally obscure, it was known that protective antibodies could be found in the body of survivors many years after infection. Sabin believed that long lasting immunity could best be established with a live attenuated vaccine. A killed vaccine might be easier to develop, but its effects might not be as long lasting. Another advantage of the live vaccine was that it could be administered by mouth. The attenuated virus might also be spread from those who had been vaccinated to others. During a period when unvaccinated people might easily encounter the wild type virus, the benefits of spreading the attenuated virus might outweigh the dangers. When the disease was almost eradicated, the transmission of even an attenuated form of the poliovirus to non-immune people might, however, be dangerous. Eventually, American epidemiologists found that the use of the live vaccine was associated with a small, but real risk of paralytic polio.
Before Sabin had perfected his oral vaccine, Jonas Salk (1914-1995) developed a successful killed vaccine that had to be administered by injection. A nationwide trial of the Salk vaccine in 1954 was successful. As a result of the Salk vaccine program, the incidence of paralytic polio in the United States decreased dramatically by 1961. The National Foundation for InfantileParalysis was committed to the Salk vaccine and unwilling to sponsor other vaccines. The World Health Organization, however, supported tests of oral polio vaccines. Sabin was an active participant in the vaccine trials carried out in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The highly successful vaccination tests in the Soviet Union reached about 145 million people by 1960. In 1985 the World Health Organization began an effort to eradicate polio worldwide. Sabin was active in the battle to lift the burden of infectious diseases throughout the world by bringing immunization to Third World children.
Albert Sabin. (Archive Photos. Reproduced with permission.)This is the complete article, containing 695 words
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