Albert Sabin — sci (polio vaccine) with roots in the Russian Empire
Albert Bruce Sabin was born Abram Saperstejn in Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, now in Poland, on 26 August 1906, to Jacob Saperstein and Tillie Krugman, Polish-Jewish parents. He was born a few months after the Białystok pogrom of June 1906.
In 1921, aged fifteen, he emigrated with his family on the SS Lapland from Antwerp, reaching New York early that year. They settled in Paterson, New Jersey, near relatives and the textile mills where his father found work. He learned English, graduated from Paterson High School, and in 1930 changed his name to Albert Sabin.
He studied at New York University, graduating in 1927, and took his medical degree there in 1931; as an intern at Bellevue Hospital he isolated the B virus from a colleague who had died after a monkey bite. After research at the Rockefeller Institute from 1935 to 1939 he joined the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and its Children's Hospital Research Foundation, where he remained until 1969. In the Second World War he served with the Army's virus commission and developed vaccines against dengue and sandfly fever.
After the war he returned to polio and developed a vaccine from live but weakened virus, given by mouth, which he and his colleagues first took themselves. Between 1955 and 1961 it was tested on some hundred million people in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Singapore, Mexico and the Netherlands. Its first industrial production and mass use were organised in the USSR by the Soviet virologist Mikhail Chumakov, and the results opened the way for American trials on 180,000 Cincinnati schoolchildren in April 1960. The vaccine was licensed in the United States in 1961 and became the main defence against polio in most of the world. Sabin did not patent it.
He received the National Medal of Science in 1970, was president of the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1970 to 1972, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986. He died in Washington on 3 March 1993, aged eighty-six, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
"Emigrated with his family in 1921 on the SS Lapland from Antwerp to New York, settling in Paterson, New Jersey."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Białystok, Grodno Governorate (now Poland)
Born Abram Saperstejn in Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, in 1906, he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1921, aged fifteen. His oral vaccine was first produced and used on a mass scale in the Soviet Union, organised by Mikhail Chumakov.
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Białystok, Grodno Governorate (now Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.