August 26: Albert Sabin’s Polio Vaccine

Albert Sabin (Saperstein), the medical researcher who developed an oral polio vaccine that was easier to administer and longer-lasting than Jonas Salk’s breakthrough polio vaccination, was born in Bialystok on this date in 1906. Sabin’s vaccine, developed in 1955 and perfected and tested widely in 1961, used an attenuated live polio virus and blocked polio from moving from the intestine to the bloodstream. Because of how it interrupted the transmission chain of polio, and because it could be administered orally, Sabin’s vaccine made it possible for polio to be virtually eradicated from the world, primarily through the efforts of the UN’s World Health Organization, to which Sabin donated his strains of the virus. As of August, 2012, fewer than a thousand cases of polio now break out in a handful of countries each year, in a world that suffered hundreds of thousands of cases of death and paralysis from the disease half a century ago. Sabin also developed vaccines against dengue fever and encephalitis. From 1969 to 1972, he lived in Israel, serving as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He died at 86 in 1993.
“A scientist who is also a human being cannot rest while knowledge which might be used to reduce suffering rests on the shelf.” —Albert Sabin
Watch Sabin discussing his decision to immunize his sown family: