Develops oral polio live–virus vaccine.
–which precludes the actual contraction of the disease.
This vaccine, endorsed by the US Public Health Service in 1961, effectively eliminated polio from the United States.
Sabin’s professional ally Hilary Koprowski played a key and prerequisite role.
SABIN: Albert Bruce Sabin was born in 1906 in Bialystock, Russia (now Poland) to Jewish parents, Jacob and Tillie Saperstein. In 1921 the family immigrated to America. In 1930 Albert became a naturalized US citizen and in the process changed his name to Sabin.
KOPROWSKI: In 1939, subsequent to the Nazi invasion, Dr. Hilary Koprowski and his wife Irene, a biologist, fled Poland to Brazil. There he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Rio de Janeiro. Koprowski’s field of research employing his signature live–vaccine modality was instrumental in finding a vaccine for yellow fever; then, polio. The lines are blurred as to where Koprowski’s polio vaccine development ended–off and where Sabin’s polio vaccine achieved a breakthrough. Koprowski’s list of honors received around the world is long and numbing.