1950's Medicine and Health | Sabin, Albert B. 1906-

VIROLOGIST WHO DEVELOPED THE UNTIMATE POLIO VACCINE

A Better Vaccine.

Albert Sabin developed an orally administered attenuated-virus vaccine against polio that by the early 1960s had completely replaced the dead-virus vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas E. Salk. Sabin's vaccine provided nearly lifetime immunity and furnished the means to eradicate polio ultimately, yet his work did not attract the publicity that Salk's did. This was because Sabin did much of his research in the Soviet Union during the cold war.

Preparation.

Polish-born Sabin worked at odd jobs to put himself through undergraduate and medical school. He developed his interest in virology as an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where he succeeded in isolating a strain of the pneumonia virus. In 1935 he took a position at the Rockefeller Institute and began investigating the polio virus. His early research at the University of...