Albert Sabin born Aug 26, 1906
Albert Sabin, polio vaccine creator, was born August 26, 1906, in Bialystok, Poland. His family left Poland in 1921 for the US, where Sabin would become an American citizen in 1930.
His oral vaccine helped lead the way to nearly eradicating the virus world wide.
Through the early 1950s, polio outbreaks caused such panic and widespread concern that parents kept their children away from school and other public facilities. Although Sabin’s vaccine came after Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine, it was the standard treatment for years because it was easier to administer and reduced the spread of polio using a weakened live virus.
87c Dr. Albert Sabin single | National Postal Museum
![While expanding the production and use of the Salk polio vaccine nationally and internationally, Connaught also intensified its research focus on the development of an oral polio vaccine (OPV), using live, but attenuated or weakened, poliovirus strains developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, a virologist based at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Salk's vaccine built blood immunity, but Sabin’s polio prevention strategy was based on preparing a vaccine that would build immunity in the digestive tract, where the poliovirus naturally replicates. Sabin’s research was thus focused on carefully selecting and cultivating attenuated poliovirus strains in the laboratory through a complex series of tissue cultures which utilized various animal cells, mostly monkey kidney and testicular tissues, in which the virus replicated.[5] But Sabin’s poliovirus strains remained alive, yet weakened and genetically stable to the point that they consistently stimulated immunity without causing disease. The finished vaccine would be easily administered with a spoon, or dropped onto a sugar cube. Once Sabin provided seed samples of his attenuated poliovirus strains, the OPV production process was not as technologically complex as for Salk’s vaccine. They involved more precise and painstaking work with tissue culturing, requiring highly sterile conditions and constant testing of the genetic stability of the attenuated strains. OPV’s advantages include ease of administration, lower cost, longer immunity, and the ability of the vaccine strains to spread in a community and immunize beyond those directly given the vaccine, thus potentially stopping outbreaks. This latter advantage also carried the very low, but real, risk of live vaccine strains reverting to virulence and directly or indirectly causing polio.](https://bittergrounds.com/wp-content/uploads/Albert-Sabin.jpg "Albert Sabin born Aug 26, 1906 1")
Albert Sabin
From the Distinguished Americans series
Issued 2006 by USPS
Designer: Richard Sheaff
Artist: Mark Summers, an illustrator from Waterdown, Canada
A stamp featuring Jonas Salk was released the same day.
Sabin created vaccines for encephalitis (sleeping sickness), sand-fly fever, and dengue fever. He also investigated a potential link between certain forms of cancer and viruses. Much of his later research focused on this link. Its interesting to note, that in 2006 the first Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine was released, and this week in the UK the world’s first lung cancer vaccine began human trials.
Undated photo of Sabin in his lab
Sabin’s poliovirus studies led indirectly to his discovery of many new viruses in the human alimentary canal and of viruses later implicated as causative agents of such human diseases as aseptic meningitis, rare types of paralysis and encephalitis, and infantile diarrhea. Besides his work on polio, Sabin conducted research in other areas: pneumococcal infections, herpes B virus, viruses affecting the nervous system, toxoplasmosis, experimental arthritis, and the role of viruses in cancer.
Albert Sabin—Conqueror of Poliomyelitis – PMC (nih.gov)