Albert Sabin's Sugar Cube Polio Vaccine and His Cold War Soviet Allies

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Albert Sabin was born Abram Saperstein in 1906 in Bialystok, came to the United States in 1921, and quit dentistry at NYU for medical research, earning his medical degree in 1931. In World War II he served as a major on the Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and winning the Legion of Merit. His autopsies had shown that poliovirus enters through the mouth and multiplies in the intestines before reaching the nervous system. So when Jonas Salk's injected, killed virus vaccine was approved in 1955, Sabin argued it protected individuals from paralysis without stopping the virus in the gut, and pushed for a live, weakened oral vaccine instead.

After testing his strains on himself, his family and, in 1954, inmates at the Chillicothe reformatory in Ohio, Sabin was stonewalled at home, so between 1956 and 1960 he worked with Soviet virologists Mikhail Chumakov and Marina Voroshilova. Over 90 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc received his vaccine in 1959 and 1960. A spring 1960 trial among 78,000 Cincinnati schoolchildren followed, and the U.S. licensed his strains in 1961 and 1962. Given on sugar cubes to mask its bitterness, the vaccine inspired songwriter Robert Sherman's spoonful of sugar song for Mary Poppins, and Sabin never patented it.

IgG antibodies in the blood from Salk's shot versus IgA antibodies in the gut from Sabin's drops
Weakening the virus by passing it repeatedly through monkey cells
A 1967 trip to Cuba to discuss public health with Fidel Castro
Serving as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel
Paralyzed by spinal calcification in 1983, then restored by surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1992 before his death in 1993

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