Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,069

This is the grave of Albert Sabin.

Born in Białystok, Poland in 1906 (it was then part of Russia), Abram Saperstejn was among the last Jewish refugees to get out of Europe before the United States disgustingly closed its doors to such immigrants with the 1924 Immigration Act. His family came to the United States in 1921, part of the huge rush to leave Europe in response to tremendous poverty of Europe after World War I, not to mention the rising anti-Semitism impacting Jews. Saperstejn and his family settled in Paterson, New Jersey, a working class town. But he was a good student and learned English and went into medicine. First, he was going to be a dentist, the most solidly Jewish middle class career that ever existed (as any reading of Philip Roth novels stresses). But while at New York University, he realized his real interest was in virology and decided on becoming a full doctor rather than a tooth puller. We need both, but I’d say that Sabin made the right decision.

Oh yes, the name. He change his name to Albert Sabin in 1930 as part of his own belief in assimilation. He wanted a name easy to pronounce and less obviously Jewish.

In the early 30s, Sabin worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York, training in everything one can know about infectious diseases. He went to London for a time for additional training and then came back to New York to work at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He moved to Cincinnati in 1939 and during World War II joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He was a lieutenant colonel, working on the diseases that impacted American troops. While in the military, he advanced a vaccination against Japanese encephalitis, a brain infection that is not always fatal, but remains fatal enough even today.

After the war, Sabin came back to Cincinnati and continued to work on stopping the horrors of infectious disease through developing vaccines. He became one of the key people working to find a solution to polio, ripping through the nation’s young people in these years and, very occasionally, adults such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a hard disease to get a handle on. There were many strains of it for one thing. So there were big teams of researchers working on it. Jonas Salk gets the majority of the credit. That’s completely fair–Salk was the first person to come up with any kind of vaccine. It was a completely life changing moment for humanity. But there was still a ton of work to be done, even after that initial vaccine. The vaccine, approved for use in 1955, did work, but it did not prevent the initial intestinal infection that created the conditions for polio in the first place.

This is where Sabin came into the story. He did autopsies of polio victims, the poor kids who had died from the virus. What he discovered is how the virus moved in the body. He saw how it was based in the intestines before it hit the nervous system and caused paralysis. That provided an opportunity to cut it off early, if one could figure out how to do it. Like anything else in science, there were lots of people working on this at the same time, building on each other’s findings. So, after Sabin figured this out, a group of scientists–John Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Robbins–discovered how to grow the poliovirus in non-nerve tissue, which laid the groundwork for future research and which won those guys the Nobel Prize in 1954. That same year, Sabin took that lab grown polio and developed an oral vaccine for it.

The oral vaccine was the real gamechanger in the fight against polio. Being the 1950s, he needed people to experiment on. So it was prisoners in the Ohio state reformatory for kids. Good times. Then he went to the Soviet Union and did mass experiments there, working with Soviet colleagues in giving the vaccine to 100 million people between 1956 and 1960. It worked great. Of course, Americans didn’t trust any of that commie science. So then Sabin ran a giant clinical trial in the Cincinnati public schools. Of course it worked on our good American children too, many of which are now at the perfect age to be rejecting vaccinations and rooting for Donald Trump and RFK Jr to destroy the vaccination system that saved their own lives. What a great country we have.

The first oral vaccine went on the market in the U.S. in 1961. Better versions quickly followed. Because it tasted bad, you had to mix it with sugar. This led to “A Spoonful of Sugar” in Mary Poppins, which is a great pop culture connection to a gross tasting pill. For all the Salk vaccine pioneered the end of this horrible, awful disease, it was Sabin’s vaccine that became the standard. And do you think Sabin rested on his laurels after this? Nope! He worked on vaccines against encephalitis and dengue.

Oh, and one other thing. Sabin refused to patent his vaccine. He didn’t do this for the money. He did it to save lives. There’s a principle missing from our entire health care system today. Or the whole world for that matter.

Sabin then worked to build up international science communities. Among them was taking trips to Cuba in the late 60s, in defiance of the United States’ idiotic policies toward that country, to encourage cooperation between the American and Cuban scientific communities. He also spent a lot of time working with scientists in Israel, though that was far less controversial. He lived there from 1969 until 1972. When he returned to the United States, for some reason he chose to work at the University of South Carolina. I guess he was doing charity for underdeveloped states.

Later in life, Sabin’s science moved into pain management. That’s because he developed calcification of the cervical spine in 1983 and, well, that sounds awful. It was awful. Sabin figured he should use his brain to solve this problem, for himself and for others. Luckily for him, a procedure developed that relieved his pain and he had this done in 1992. He was 86 years old, but he was more than willing to take that risk too.

Sabin died in 1993. He was 86 years old. It didn’t have anything to do with that surgery though. It was heart failure.

I assume that RFK and the Trump administration will be making polio great again in the next three years and the work of Sabin, Salk, and others will be erased. I hear raw milk is a great cure for polio.

Albert Sabin is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the Polio Hall of Fame in Warm Springs, Georgia, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. This is 17 people critical in the fight against polio. Thomas Francis, who was Salk’s mentor, is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Joseph Melnick, who did much of the critical virology research, is in Spring Branch, Texas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.