http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006CJ4Z4/?tag=2022091-20
1965
educator physician scientist virologist
Sabin was born on August 26, 1906, in Białystok, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, to Polish-Jewish parents, Jacob Saperstein and Tillie Krugman under the name of Albert Saperstein. He immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1921 and became an American citizen nine years later. He then also changed his name to Sabin, as well as assuming the middle name Bruce.
After attending New York University as a pre-dental student he switched to medical school and to an interest in microbiology, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1928. Upon receiving his medical degree in 1931, Sabin immediately began research on the nature and cause of polio, an acute viral infection that could result in death or paralysis.
In 1931, Sabin immediately began research on the nature and cause of polio. This disease had reached epidemic proportions affecting people around the world. During his internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Sabin successfully isolated the B virus from a colleague who had died after a bite from a monkey. Sabin was soon able to prove the B virus's relation to the herpes simplex virus, the cause of herpes in humans.
Sabin joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City in 1935 and four years later left for a post at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was there that he proved that polio viruses not only grew in nervous tissue, as was generally assumed, but that they lived in the small intestines. By introducing the idea of enteroviruses —viruses that lived in the gut—Sabin established that poliomyelitis was essentially an infection of the alimentary tract. This discovery indicated that poliomyelitis might be vulnerable to a vaccine taken orally.
Sabin's work on a poliomyelitis vaccine was interrupted by World War II. In 1941 he joined the U. S. Army Epidemiological Board's Virus Committee and accepted assignments in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific. During this phase of his career Sabin developed vaccines for encephalitis (sleeping sickness), sand-fly fever, and dengue fever. At the war's end Sabin returned to Cincinnati and to his research on the polio virus.
Convinced that the polio virus in nature lived primarily in the intestines, Sabin resolved to make the human gut a hostile environment for it. This he intended to accomplish by isolating a mutant form of the polio virus that was incapable of producing the disease. The avirulent virus would then be propagated and introduced into the intestines, where it would reproduce rapidly, displacing the lethal virulent forms of the polio virus and protecting the human host from the disease. Sabin's goal from the outset was to find a live and safe variant polio virus that could be administered orally to combat poliomyelitis.
After an intensive investigation during which he discovered a number of new enteroviruses, Sabin managed to isolate the viruses he sought. Sabin and his research associates first ingested the live avirulent viruses themselves before they experimented on other human subjects. For two years (1955-1957) he gave the vaccine to hundreds of prison inmates with no harmful effects. At this point Sabin was ready for large-scale tests, but he could not carry them out in the United States. A rival polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in 1954 was then being tested for its efficacy in preventing the disease among American school children.
Whereas Sabin thought an attenuated live virus diluted and weakened would be effective, Salk was determined to create a vaccine using a killed form of the virus.
Some foreign virologists, especially those from the U. S. S. R., were convinced of the superiority of the Sabin vaccine, and hence it was first subjected to widespread tests outside the United States from 1957 to 1959. Millions of Russians, and millions more living in Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, gained protection from poliomyelitis with Sabin's vaccine. A much smaller group of persons living in Sweden, England, Singapore, and the United States received Sabin's vaccine by the end of 1959.
In the meantime the Salk vaccine experienced some problems that made the American medical community more receptive to the solution proposed by Sabin. Salk's vaccine, which utilized killed virulent polioviruses, was accidently contaminated with some live virulent polioviruses which subsequently brought death or severe illness to several hundred school children. In addition, the Salk vaccine was somewhat difficult to administer (it was necessary to inject it into the body) and it was effective for a relatively short time (less than a year).
Sabin took advantage of this situation by vigorously promoting his vaccine. It was, he said, free of virulent viruses, easily administered orally, and effective over a long period of time. The battle that ensued between the supporters of the Salk and Sabin vaccines was finally won by the Sabin forces and hence it was a live virus vaccine that was used in the United States and the rest of the world to eradicate poliomyelitis. The battle between Salk and Sabin went on for years. Salk denounced Sabin's vaccine in 1973 as being unsafe and tried to persuade the public to use his vaccine again. But he was ignored by many, and by 1993 health organizations reported the near-extinction of the polio disease in the Western Hemisphere.
The success of his polio vaccine brought Sabin many honors at home and abroad. Always a tireless researcher, Sabin did not rest upon his laurels but moved on to a new field of study—the viral origins of human cancer. After more than a decade of work he was forced in 1977 to conclude that cancers were not caused by viruses as he had first assumed. During this time he served as research professor at the University of South Carolina until taking an emeritus status in 1982. In 1980 he traveled to Brazil to deal with a new outbreak of polio, and retired from medicine in 1986.
Until his death on March 3, 1993, of heart failure, Sabin continued to add wood to the fire, speaking out against many ideals, including his doubts that a vaccine should be developed to fight the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS.
Albert Sabin, a noted virologist, developed an oral vaccine for polio that led to the once dreaded disease’s virtual extinction in the Western Hemisphere. Sabin’s long and distinguished research career included many major contributions to virology, including work that led to the development of attenuated live-virus vaccines. During World War II, he developed effective vaccines against dengue fever and Japanese B encephalitis. The development of a live polio vaccine, however, was Sabin’s crowning achievement.
Although Sabin’s polio vaccine was not the first, it eventually proved to be the most effective and became the predominant mode of protection against polio throughout the Western world. In South America, “Sabin Sundays” were held twice a year to eradicate the disease. The race to produce the first effective vaccine against polio was marked by intense and often acrimonious competition between scientists and their supporters; in addition to the primary goal of saving children, fame and fortune were at stake. Sabin, however, allowed his vaccine to be used free of charge by any reputable organizations as long as they met his strict standards in developing the appropriate strains.
Sabin was elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia, on January 2, 1958. The Cincinnati Convention Center was named after Sabin from 1985 to 2006. In 1999, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center named its new education and conference center for Sabin. The street that runs between the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center was renamed Albert Sabin Way on April 28, 2000.
On March 6, 2006, the US Postal Service issued an 87-cent postage stamp bearing his image, in its Distinguished Americans series. In early 2010, Sabin was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol. In 2012, Albert Sabin was named a "Great Ohioan" by the Capitol Square Foundation.
Sabin was a big philanthropist. From the development of his vaccine, Sabin didn't gain a single dollar, and continued to live on his salary as a professor.
Physical Characteristics: In 1983, Sabin developed calcification of the cervical spine, which caused paralysis and intense pain. This condition was successfully treated by surgery conducted at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1992 when Sabin was 86.
Sabin was married three times. The first marriage was to Sylvia Tregillus, who died in 1966. He then married Jane Warner. However, the marriage ended with a divorce, and he married his third wife, Heloisa Dunshee De Abranches in 1972.
Sabin had 2 daughters from the first marriage: Amy Horn and Deborah.
