Conquering Polio | There Is No Patent | 4

0:08From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story.

0:31In the first half of the 20th century, terrified parents across America braced for the arrival of summer, the start of polio season. At the time, the illness was poorly understood, and the nation was desperate to find a way to protect against the so-called infantile paralysis. While most people who became ill recovered, photographs of children in leg braces, using crutches, or confined to iron lungs sent waves of fear through communities across the country. But in the early 1950s, two scientists came to define the race to develop a vaccine against polio, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. And if you ask people today who developed the polio vaccine, most will say Jonas Salk.

1:11But Sabin created a vaccine too, one that proved crucial, though his name never earned the same recognition. My guest today is working to change that. Karen Torgeli is an epidemiologist and oral historian. Her book, Albert Sabin, The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer, is due to be published by Yale University Press in June of 2026. Our conversation is next.

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2:31Karen Torgaley, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. So one of your earliest memories actually involves a polio outbreak in your own family. I was wondering if you could share that story. We lived in San Francisco when I was a child, and it was in the mid-1950s, when just before the polio vaccine came out that Salk developed. My brother was 12 and a half months older than me, so we were very close and good buddies. He was three and a half, and I was two and a half. My first memory of anything is seeing him sitting on a table with my dad, moving his legs and asking him to move his legs, and he was crying a lot.

3:17So because he was crying, I was crying, and I didn't understand why my dad was doing something that would hurt him or what was going on. So the result for my brother was that he had one leg that was smaller than the other, but it didn't hold him back in any significant way, and he was able to pass his physical to get into the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, so he did pretty well. Now, in our series, we described virologist Albert Sabin as someone who could be at times abrasive. You conducted an oral history project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where you interviewed dozens of scientists about their work on polio.

3:56And when you had mentioned Albert Sabin to them, what was the reaction? What did people think about him? It was very obvious if they knew him. I asked about a number of other scientists, too, Jonas Halk and Hilary Kaprowski and some of the others. And if they knew them, it didn't seem to make a big impression on them. But if I asked them about Albert Sabin, I could tell right away just by their body language. language and usually I could see that there was a story coming and that it was going to be interesting because he was such an abrasive but also interesting character in other ways. There was one scientist who had brought a paper with him that he had sent to Albert Sabin for his input and it was full of red marks.

4:45They were so deep in the paper it looked like he was really angry when he was correcting it with lots of exclamation points and nasty remarks all over it. And the scientist was holding it up as if it was sort of a badge of honor because he passed the surveillance test by Albert Sabin. His daughters told me when I met them, and his daughters are close to my age, he was angry a lot. He was a perfectionist and expected them to do everything perfectly. So it was a difficult life for them. So let's get a sense of this man, Albert Sabin. Let's begin with his upbringing. What was his youth like and how did he eventually get into virology?

5:28Well, it's interesting because he was an immigrant. He was born in 1906 in Poland. And at that time in a big part of Eastern Europe, there are lots of pogroms, persecution against the Jewish people, and especially in their little town of Bielestock, businesses were being burned, people were being murdered, and there was no support from the army or the police. They just were on their own to defend themselves. So when he was born, they did not even go out and register his birth because it was too dangerous. One of the stories Sabin remembered as a five-year-old was he had been born with an eye condition that caused him not to have sight in one of his eyes, and he was walking home with a friend of his from school and some Catholic children who had just gotten out of their church started taunting them and calling them names and then they began to throw rocks at them.

6:26And one very sharp rock hit Sabin a quarter of an inch from his eye that he still had vision in and bled quite a lot. But he said if it had been any closer, if it got hit his eye, he probably would have been blinded. So that was a very traumatic experience for him. Part of their family immigrated in 1910, but Sabin's family couldn't go yet because the mom's mother was very ill and she couldn't travel, and they didn't want to leave her to die by herself. So they started their process in around 1918 when Sabin was 13, and it took them 18 months to get to the United States. But when they got there, there were other family members who welcomed them into the new country.

7:16And Saban, he remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty. And by then, he was 14 and didn't speak English. The family, the mom and dad were both weavers and textile workers in Bielestock. And fortunately for them, there was a city nearby, Patterson, New Jersey, that was just near New York City, where they had lots of jobs for textile workers. So they were able to get work right away. And Sabin applied to go to school in Patterson High School. They couldn't read his transfer records at all because they're in a foreign language. So they just asked him, what would you do if you were us? Where would you put you?

7:58He said, why don't you just put me with where I would be if I was in Poland and see how I do. If I do all right, then I'll stay with my class. And if I don't, then I'll repeat some. So they did that, and it was very bright. So he was able to graduate with his class with top honors. But how did he get an interest in virology? He had an uncle by marriage who was a dentist, a very successful one in New York City. And he did not have any sons. So he made the offer to Albert and his family that if he would go to dental school and going to practice with him later in life, that he would pay for all of his school expenses.

8:40He got two or three years of dental school background and training. Then in 1926, he read a book called The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Cruyff. And after he read that book, he knew he could not go into dentistry because he had to be a medical researcher. He knew. It gave him what he called a terrific compulsion. So he went to someone who had trained him in his undergraduate school in microbiology, who he knew was involved with the New York City Health Department and had some laboratory space that he had access to. So he went to this man whose name was William Park and just knocked on the door and he said, I have this terrific compulsion to be a medical a researcher, and I need to start now, and I need to have some lab space.

9:34So he gave it to him. And Sabin would spend every minute in the lab that he could spare, and he watched the people in the lab, how they worked, what they did, what the materials were, and studied in between. He spent most of his life in that lab from then on. And he had told his uncle that he couldn't going to dentistry. And so he was on his own. He had to work his way through school and did that by getting jobs in other labs. And one of the jobs he had was figuring out what kind of bacteria pneumonia patients had that was making them sick. So there were different strains of pneumococcus pneumonia, which was a bacteria.

10:20And to find out what it was, he would get sputum specimens from the people who were coughing things up from their lungs, and then he would make a mixture and inject it into mice in the lab and then wait for the bacteria to grow, and the next day he would open up their abdomens and see what kind of bacteria they had. Well, when it took overnight, and these people were so severely ill, lots of them died before he got the answers he needed. So he figured out a way to maybe make it a faster system. So what he did was, instead of sacrificing the mice after he injected them, he just let it grow in their abdomens for two or three hours.

11:02And then he inserted a little hollow tube and would get some fluid out of the mice that way, and it didn't hurt them. And he found out that he could get results within two or three hours instead of waiting overnight. So this was big news in their world because so many people were dying of pneumonia. that didn't have antibiotics then, all they could do was treat them with antiserum to that particular kind of bacteria. That was his first paper. He had not finished medical school at all, and when he did graduate from medical school, he was asked a question on his exam, what's the name of the test for identifying bacteria in pneumonia patients?

11:45And it was called the Sabin test. That's how he got his start in virology and his interest in virology. Now, after medical school and when Sabin began his residency training, a terrible polio epidemic hit New York, and he was commissioned to help handle the crisis at Bellevue Hospital, eventually ending up at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. How did his experiences with this polio outbreak early on and his time at the Rockefeller Institute afterwards, how did this influence his path as a scientist? He became convinced that he needed to work with viruses and he needed to specialize in polio because it took such a toll.

12:24Every year, every summer, there would be epidemics of polio and many children died. Many were paralyzed and many were infected and didn't die, but he could see that this was a big need right now. He had originally gone into pediatrics, so having all those children die and being a witness to them in those years was a life-changing experience for him. They had at the time some iron lungs, but they never had enough. So there would be wards full of children lined up with just their heads sticking out and not able to breathe on their own and not able to be with their families or with anybody but the medical staff.

13:10No one was allowed to visit them because of the danger of being infected themselves. And that really impacted him. He did lots of the lab tests himself. He did autopsies on kids who died. So that's how he started to get involved with polio. And that's the path he took in his life. And that about brings us up to the outbreak of World War II when FDR, himself a polio survivor, was in the White House. And his organization, eventually known as the March of Dimes, was busy raising money for treating polio victims. It was a well-known and well-feared disease. What did Albert Sabin do during this period?

13:50During World War II, he was commissioned by the Army to be on a specialist team of elite scientists who could help identify viruses that the soldiers would be exposed to that they had never been exposed to before. So Sabin was on this commission. He wanted to enlist, and he wanted to be close to the front lines where people were getting sick. so he could get to them as quickly as possible. So even though he was blind in one eye and he was 37 years old and would never have been drafted, he went to enlist in the army and they took him. He looked into sample life fever. He looked into dengue and encephalitis and polio.

14:37He would go and find what the carriers were of these viruses and where they lived, how they infected creatures and people, and then what they could do to prevent the illness in the soldiers. Sometimes it was giving them insect repellent, spraying the heck out of everything with EDT, and sometimes he would try to make a rudimentary vaccine against them. And at that time, there was a new system where they could do research in a tent that was put close to the front lines. It wasn't ideal. They didn't have all the equipment they needed. It was horrible conditions. It was super hot and miserable, but that's where he wanted to be and chose to be.

15:29As Americans, we're constantly grappling with the fundamental question. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we strive to create the world as it should be? Our answers tend to ebb and flow through the decades. But once, just after a war that nearly tore us apart, we came as close as we've come to answering it. And it's a story worth a closer look. I'm Michelle Obama, and I'm proud to announce Higher Ground's new podcast, Reconstruction, The Unfinished Promise. Guided by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell and featuring my husband, Barack Obama, This limited series uncovers the untold stories of Reconstruction, what they mean for us today, and how our past can shape the future we choose to build.

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17:35After World War II, fascism had been defeated, but polio had not. And the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the March of Dimes, wanted researchers to develop a vaccine, and they wanted it quickly. Jonas Salk spent two years identifying the three types of poliovirus that made humans ill, while Sabin continued his own research. The two men did know one another. What can you tell us about their relationship early on? Sabin was seven years older than Jonas Salk and had many different experiences that made him a better virologist than Salk. By that time, Albert Sabin had five years of research that he did at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, which was a very elite group of scientists.

18:22Jonas Salk at that time was not that long out of his residency, but he had been commissioned to look into confirming that there were three strains of poliovirus that caused disease in humans. It was kind of like the ditch digging of virus research because it was just a lot of reproducing the disease in monkeys and seeing which of the 196 strains actually did cause disease. It just was a long process. But in the process, they were at a lot of meetings together. They would sit up long into the night talking about their ideas and things that they would do to possibly make a vaccine for polio and how they would do it.

19:04And Sabin became a mentor to Salk. And they got along pretty well by all reports. And that began to change when Salk had decided because he had made a vaccine during the war in Michigan with a guy named Tommy Francis for influenza. And it was a killed virus vaccine, meaning that the virus was inactivated completely to the point where they didn't think it was possible for a person who got the vaccine with the viruses in it could get sick from them because they were dead. And that's the type of vaccine he wanted to make. Sabin had decided that he wanted to make a live virus vaccine. The difference between the two was that the live virus vaccine was weak, but it was still alive.

19:57And the way he did that was the strains that were infectious to humans, he would take samples of those and inject monkeys and let the monkeys get sick. They would take samples from that monkey and inject it into another monkey, they would get sick. And he kept doing it until the vaccine didn't cause disease anymore. But it was still the same strain. It had just mutated enough that it didn't cause disease. But what can happen with a live virus vaccine is that it can revert to virulence. If it's put into a body that doesn't have a strong immune system, for instance, that body can develop their disease.

20:41and that was the big concern. But it was so rare that they didn't even realize that it could happen till years later. So they had this fundamental difference in the kind of vaccine that they wanted to make and they had lots of arguments about why one was better than the other. Sabin very firmly believed that a live virus vaccine would produce a longer kind of immunity and a lifelong immunity, whereas the Salk vaccine, the killed virus vaccine, would have to be repeated every few years. People in the initial dose would have to get one shot for each of the three strains of virus that cause disease and then a booster.

21:24So there's starting to be this division in the polio vaccine community. And that was kind of when Sabin and Salk started to part their ways too. So there's an idea that Albert Sabin was in a race with Jonas Salk to create a polio vaccine. Did Sabin see things in those terms? He would say no. He just said, you know, a lot of that was blown up by the press because it sold newspapers. He said, no, he said, we had a fine relationship. But other people who were witnesses to some of their interactions would not have agreed with them. They had to be made to sit together sometimes, and it was very tense for everybody around them.

22:07And at one point, they were supposed to speak at a meeting one after the other, and they chose to do it by alphabetical order, so they wouldn't fight about that. Sabin went first, and when he got up to do his presentation, he said, well, there's one thing that Jonas and I agree about, and that is there should only be one poliovirus vaccine. And so, of course, each of them thought it should be theirs. But it was the Salk vaccine that was first. In April of 1954, field trials were conducted on hundreds of thousands of children in the United States. And a year later, on April 12th, 1955, the findings were announced at a dramatic press conference.

22:45But Albert Sabin was at that press conference. What did he say about that time? He was at that press conference, and he knew that this was coming. He knew that Salk's vaccine would be better than nothing. He was very conflicted, but he also was convinced that if they didn't do something soon, the next polio season would be upon them and children were going to die. So he swallowed his pride in some ways, and the people who were selected to make the decision about whether to go forward and let everyone get vaccinated with the Salk vaccine, he said, yes, they should. So he did vote in support of it.

23:31He still had a couple of years to go before he felt comfortable that his vaccine would be safe enough to try on human beings. He was just getting ready to do some of his experiments on prisoners in a reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio, and that would be his first big trial on humans. And it would prove to be very successful. But what happened in the meantime was the Salk vaccine was such a blessing for everyone. The biggest fear that people had at that time was their children getting polio or having a nuclear war. And those were the two big fears. So essentially, one of those fears was wiped out when the vaccine was developed.

24:15And it was such a joyous time for people. They could relax a little bit and know that they didn't have to go through the summers preventing their children from going to swimming pools or places where they would get polio. Now they were protected. So Jonas Salk became sort of a celebrity scientist. He was well-spoken and handsome, and the press loved him, and the public loved him. And so Salk's vaccine was used for five full years before the Sabin vaccine was ready to be used and had been tested on people in Eastern Europe. So you say Sabin tested his oral polio vaccine in Eastern Europe, but this is during the Cold War.

24:59Where did he find his test subjects? At the time, in the 1950s, there were huge polio epidemics in the USSR. These epidemics were just wiping out many, many children and causing lots of paralysis in others. So they found out about the Salk vaccine and that it was successful in the United States, and they were desperate to get something that would work for them. And they decided to send their best virologists from the USSR to the United States to learn how to make the vaccines. They also knew that Sabin was developing another kind of vaccine. They wanted to learn about both. So this scientist named Mikhail Chumakov and his wife, Marina Voroshilova, were two of the most famous scientists in Russia.

25:51They came over with several other people and, of course, with the KGB watching them and our people watching everybody. And they traveled from lab to lab to learn the techniques that they needed to know to develop a polio vaccine in the Soviet Union. They really bonded with Sabin because Sabin remembered how to speak some Russian. And he had that Eastern European experience, and his personality and Chumakov's personality were very similar. They both had these explosive tempers and were perfectionists and wouldn't put up with any nonsense. They bonded and became good friends, and this lasted their whole lives.

26:35So when they went back to Russia, both Voroshilova and Chumakov had vials of Sabin's vaccine viruses in their pockets on the airplanes. And he gave them really detailed instructions about how to make vaccine from those samples. So they had that good start. They also had gotten permission to use the Salk vaccine. And there was a scientist in St. Petersburg, it was called Leningrad at the time, who used the Salk vaccine for at least a year and tried it to see if it would stop their epidemics that were going on there, and he had very little success with it. Shumakov, he wanted to give the Sabin vaccine to the people because he could see that it was a superior vaccine and that it would stop the epidemics that they were in danger of having.

27:28The difference was the Salk vaccine was injected and just got into the blood, but the Sabin vaccine was given orally, and it got into the blood and the gut. And they had discovered that polio was spread by fecal oral route instead of by the respiratory route. Now, Chomakov had already organized all the administering programs to give the Sabin vaccine. And they were organized in the different health units that they had within the country that were all set. All they had to do was get the go-ahead to do it, and they didn't have it.

28:14You there! Tis I, Queen Mortuana of the Night Realm, a.k.a. Kate McKinnon, and her Raven minion Jojo, a.k.a. Emily Lynn. If you do not download and binge my show, Heads Will Roll, Air Apparent, on Audible, I will cut off your head! Oh no! Maybe just tell them about the guest stars, like Richard Kind, Carrie Coon, Jimmy Fallon, at all. But they were in it, and if you don't listen to them, then I will cut off your tongue, then cut off your head, and then put the tongue in the head hole. Aw, you tried. Listen now exclusively on Audible and Donald the Audible app today, or off with your head! I'm kidding.