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About Us: |
The Legacy of Albert B. SabinThe Sabin Vaccine Institute is dedicated to carrying on the vision and work of one of the pre-eminent figures in the history of medicine, Dr. Albert B. Sabin. Best known as the developer of the oral live virus polio vaccine, Dr. Sabin's life was not only an unending quest for scientific excellence in the service of humanity, but also a tireless campaign against poverty and ignorance. It was in this spirit that his longtime friends and colleagues, led by Heloisa Sabin, his widow, and Dr. H.R. Shepherd, the Founding Chairman, established the Sabin Vaccine Institute in 1993, at the time of Dr. Sabin's death. Dr. Sabin was born on August 26, 1906, in Bialystok, Poland. He emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1921, in order to avoid persecutions directed against Jews. He received his M.D. from New York University in 1931 and immediately began research on polio, which is an acute viral infection that can cause death or paralysis. Polio at that time had reached epidemic proportions around the world. Dr. Sabin joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City in 1935, leaving four years later for the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was there that he proved polio viruses not only grow in nervous tissue, but that they live in the small intestines. By introducing the idea of enteroviruses - viruses that live in the gut - he established that poliomyelitis is essentially an infection of the alimentary tract. This, in turn, indicated that polio might be prevented by an oral vaccine. This early 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. It was during this phase of his career that Dr. Sabin developed vaccines for encephalitis (sleeping sickness), sand-fly fever, and dengue fever. At the end of World War II, he returned to Cincinnati and resumed his research on the polio virus. Convinced that the polio virus lived primarily in the intestines, he focused on isolating a mutant form of the polio virus that was incapable of producing the disease and thereby safe for introduction to the human body. This avirulent virus would reproduce rapidly in the intestines, displacing lethal forms of the polio virus and providing protection from the disease. Dr. Sabin's goal from the outset was to find a live and safe variant polio virus that could be administered orally to combat poliomyelitis. Dr. Sabin and his research associates first ingested the live avirulent viruses themselves before experimenting on others. The oral vaccine was first tested outside the USA from 1957 to 1959. Ultimately the Sabin vaccine was used to eradicate polio throughout the world. From 1970, Dr. Sabin served successively as President of the Weizmann Institute of Science (1970-72), full-time expert consultant of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (1974), Distinguished Research Professor of Biomedicine at the Medical University of South Carolina (1974-82), and Senior Expert Consultant at the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Studies in the Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (1984-86). In 1986 at the age of 80, he retired from his full-time positions but continued part-time at the Fogarty International Center as a Senior Medical Science Advisor and a lecturer in the United States and abroad. Dr. Sabin continued into his eighties to have a powerful and significant impact on the international scientific community in his capacity as medical statesman, consultant, and lecturer. His contributions were not just in the scientific realm but included a more global perspective of humanitarianism. He became an advocate for peace and fought the diseases of ignorance and poverty by espousing the same strategies of mutual trust and international cooperation which led to the conquest of polio. Dr. Sabin died on March 3, 1993. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.
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