Sabin, Albert (1906–93)

Born on August 26, 1906, in Bialystok, Poland, to Jacob and Tillie Sabin, Albert B. Sabin is known for his discovery of the live polio vaccine now used in the United States and around the world. It has been estimated that in the first two years of global use of Sabin's vaccine, half a million lives were saved and 5 million people avoided contracting polio.

Sabin and his family immigrated to the United States in 1921 where he began attending medical school in 1926; in 1931, Sabin earned his medical degree from New York University. His early research on the polio virus was forwarded to the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis and he worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research until he moved to Cincinnati in 1939 to teach at the University of Cincinnati.

During World War II, Sabin—serving in the U. S. Army Medical Corp—helped develop a vaccine against dengue fever (Japanese encephalitis) used on 65,000 military personnel. After the war, Sabin developed a polio vaccine using a live virus, in contrast to the dead polio virus used in the Jonas E. Salk vaccine. With Salk's virus, doctors needed to give booster injections to keep the immunity current; Sabin, meanwhile, experimented during the 1950s with a live oral polio virus pill. He tested the pill first on himself and then on a test group from 1955 to 1957.

From 1957 to 1959, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations used Sabin's oral vaccine, while the United States still used Salk's injection. In 1960, Sabin's vaccination was used on 100 million European children; from 1962 to 1964, approximately 100 million people in the United States received Sabin's vaccine.

In the 1970s, Sabin focused on cancer research in Israel and in the United States. In 1974, he was appointed Distinguished Research Professor of Biomedicine at the Medical University of South Carolina; and from 1984 to 1986, he served as the Senior Expert Consultant at the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Studies in the Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

Sabin was awarded 46 honorary degrees worldwide, and he received the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1986. He died on March 3, 1993.