Dr. Albert Sabin, Developer of Oral Polio Vaccine, Dies : Medicine: Although his treatment was created after Dr. Salk’s, it led to complete control of the disease.
Dr. Albert Sabin, the single-minded, domineering scientist who initially exposed himself to the oral vaccine that ultimately overcame infantile paralysis in the United States, died Wednesday in Washington.
He was 86 and died at Georgetown University Medical Center of congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Amy Horne.
Sabin was admitted to the hospital Feb. 22 after suffering heart failure, spokeswoman Jody Klein said.
Although he had been ill intermittently, Sabin remained active until shortly before his death. Last June he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which he argued that the unusual nature of the AIDS virus makes it inherently impossible to develop a vaccine against it.
The paper also was to become the final skirmish between Sabin and Dr. Jonas Salk, who was his prime competitor in the international race to develop a polio vaccine and who is one of the leaders in the search for an AIDS vaccine.
Notified of his rival’s death, Salk said it was “a great loss. . . . His contributions toward the control of polio will endure long in the future.”
Salk claimed an initial victory in the polio race in 1955, developing a killed-virus vaccine that eliminated 90% of the disease in the United States and that is still used in some areas of the world, such as Scandinavia.
But complete control of polio occurred only with Sabin’s development of a live-virus vaccine that was approved for general use in 1961. Sabin isolated a strain of the polio virus that could infect people and stimulate immunity to polio without producing the disease.
Sabin’s vaccine had several advantages. It could be transported easily, stored for a long time, required only one dose (compared to four for Salk’s) and, most important, was given orally on a sugar cube or in juice. By the late 1960s, it was virtually impossible to obtain Salk vaccine in the United States.
As with all live-virus vaccines, it could occasionally produce a case of the disease, perhaps once in every million times it was used. But the vaccine was so effective in wiping out the normal transmission of polio that by the early 1980s the vaccine was the largest source of polio in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In a statement, Dr. Hioshi Nakajima, director of the World Health Organization, called Sabin “one of the great pioneers of medical research in our century. Thanks to his polio vaccine, millions have been saved from this terrible disease.”
Nakajima predicted that the disease will be eradicated by the end of the decade.
“He enriched my life and I think he enriched the lives of many people,” said Heloisa Sabin, his wife of 20 years.
Prior to Salk and Sabin, polio had plagued the United States and other countries as a summer epidemic for decades. It was a prominent crippler of children but also victimized adults, the most prominent of whom was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt was stricken in midlife by the disease and could stand only with the aid of braces. Others spent their lives in iron lungs, a whole-body breathing device.
In 1952, there were 21,269 cases reported in the United States; 10 years later, after the introduction of the Salk and Sabin vaccines, only 893 cases were reported.
Sabin had also carved out a more prominent position in the scientific community because Salk gravitated more toward the limelight and enjoyed the public stir his vaccine had created; Sabin maintained a more reserved position.
In 1990, when Sabin received the prestigious Phoenix Award from the Foundation for Critical Care, the group’s founder, Stephen Ayres, said he had for years been surprised by Sabin’s lack of antagonism toward other scientists in the medical research field.
“You hear so much about scientists cutting each other in the throat, but he’s just a gentle man,” Ayres said.
Sabin, however, said he “wished that were true.”
“I’d rather not go on the psychiatrist’s couch, but I’ve been competitive in my life. I’m very critical of things that go on.”
Many believe the differences between Salk and Sabin helped keep the Nobel Prize from Salk. The 1954 prize--the only one granted for poliomyelitis vaccine research--went instead to a Boston research team headed by Dr. John F. Enders, who discovered how to grow polio virus in the test tube, laying the groundwork for development of Salk’s and Sabin’s vaccines.
“Albert Sabin was out for me from the very beginning,” Salk said two years ago. “In 1960, he said to me, just like that, that he was out to kill the killed vaccine.”
Sabin was no more complimentary. “It was pure kitchen chemistry,” Sabin said of Salk’s vaccine. “Salk didn’t discover anything.”
Albert Bruce Sabin was born Aug. 26, 1906, in Bialystok, Poland, the son of Jacob Sabin and Tillie Krugman. The family immigrated to the United States when he was 15, arriving at Ellis Island and settling in Patterson, N.J.
Two cousins gave him a six-week cram course in English and mathematics, enabling him to be admitted to high school.
Sigmund Sidney, an uncle who was a dentist, offered to finance Sabin’s schooling if he agreed to study dentistry.
Sabin did so for three years, then switched to medicine and, cut off by his uncle, paid for his schooling with scholarships, fellowships and odd jobs at hospitals.
“I couldn’t stand it any longer,” he said. “My imagination had been caught by medical research.”
He received his medical degree in 1931 from New York University, where as a medical student he studied several types of pneumonia. He interned at Bellevue Hospital, where he isolated Virus B, one of the pneumonia viruses.
Sabin served on the staffs of many medical institutions, including the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he performed the bulk of his polio research.
He had previously performed postgraduate study at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London and returned to the United States to join the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
During World War II he served in the Army Medical Corps, where he developed a vaccine against dengue (tropical) fever and oversaw the vaccination of 65,000 military personnel on Okinawa against Japanese encephalitis.
After his discharge as a lieutenant colonel he returned to the University of Cincinnati as professor of research pediatrics.
His new research led to the identification of three types of poliomyelitis virus, a discovery he shared with other scientists. He also developed his first vaccine from a living virus. He credited Enders’ team for much of the basic research.
After first using an attenuated virus to vaccinate chimpanzees, Sabin tried it on himself to test its safety. In January, 1955, he began inoculating prisoners at the federal reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio, who had volunteered for the tests.
On the basis of preliminary trials by the World Health Organization, which supervised large programs in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Mexico and Singapore, the Sabin vaccine was approved for use in the United States.
Between 1962 and 1964, 100 million Americans swallowed the cube, many on “Sabin Sundays” organized by doctors and health departments.
Sabin’s next project led to the discovery of Echo 9--a virus similar to that which causes intestinal flu--and its effects on pregnant woman and possible transmission to unborn children. He also explored the links between viruses and some forms of cancers.
Active and curious into old age, he was developing an aerosol vaccine against measles.
“The spray vaccine was supposed to be my swan song, then I was going to return to my home here in Washington with my wife and enjoy life,” he said in a 1983 interview.
But the interview instead took place in a hospital, where Sabin was recovering from a mystifying paralyzing ailment.
“It’s one thing to study paralysis and its quite another to have it yourself,” he said.
He said the ordeal had started in May, 1983, when he developed trouble walking. He underwent spinal cord surgery that August, and less than a week later he developed paralysis.
Later, doctors at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., diagnosed his difficulty as polyneuritis, a disease of the nerve fiber.
He made a steady recovery. In 1985, a photographer approached Sabin as he slowly walked with the aid of a cane across a room in Washington where the fifth anniversary of the TV show “Nightline” was being celebrated.
“Are you one of the hostages?” asked the photographer, who confused the white-haired scientist with one of several former Iran hostages who were on hand.
Smiling at his wife, Sabin replied: “You might say that recently I was, indeed, something of a hostage.”
The paralysis was only one of several health problems Sabin had endured.
A Jew, Sabin was deeply interested in Israeli affairs and he served as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel from 1970 to 1972.
Institute officials said his departure from the Israeli post was the result of poor health after open-heart surgery in 1972. Others, however, said Sabin’s domineering personality had caused discord.
Back home, he became a consultant at the National Institutes of Health, then a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and, at the time he was stricken with polyneuritis, a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington.
His health began to fail over the next several years and the best of his research days were over.
He received dozens of national and international awards, among them the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986, the highest civilian prize in the United States.
Both tragedy and triumph touched his life.
In 1966 his wife, Sylvia, to whom he had been married 31 years, was found dead at home in Cincinnati by one of their two daughters, girls he called “my greatest achievements.”
A year later he married the former Jane Warner, but that marriage ended in divorce a year later. He is survived by his third wife, Brazilian Heloisa Dunshee de Abrances, whom he married at the age of 66.
In 1986 at a daylong 80th birthday celebration at the National Institutes of Health, Sabin attributed his drive “to the old teaching that you don’t live only for yourself.”
“That’s what I’ve tried to do. (But) now I want to rest. I’m a little too old for any more frustrations.”
Times science writer Thomas H. Maugh II contributed to this obituary.
