Sabin, Albert B

Sabin, Albert B(ruce)

(born Aug. 26, 1906, Bialystok, Poland, Russian Empire—died March 3, 1993, Washington, D.C., U.S.) Polish-born U.S. physician and microbiologist. He immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1921 and received an M.D. from New York University. He grew poliovirus in human nerve tissue outside the body, showed that it does not enter the body through the respiratory system, and proved that poliomyelitis is primarily an infection of the digestive tract. He postulated that an oral vaccine would work longer than Jonas Salk's injections of killed virus, and he isolated weakened strains of each of the three types of poliovirus that would stimulate antibody production but not produce disease. The Sabin oral polio vaccine, approved for use in the U.S. in 1960, became the main defense against polio throughout the world.