TWiV Special: Albert Sabin with Karen Torghele

0:00From Microbe TV, this is TWIV, This Week in Virology, a special episode recorded on May 29th, 28th, May 28th, 2026. I'm Vincent Racaniello, and you're listening to the podcast All About Viruses. As you can see today, I'm at the incubator, and I have a special guest. She is the author of a brand new book, Albert Sabin, The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer. And if you listen to TWIV, you know I used to work on poliovirus and I talk about Albert Sabin. So this is a natural to have the author, Karen Torgele, here to talk about it. Welcome to TWIV. Thank you. It's nice to be here. So go out and buy the book.

0:50We'll ask you again at the end. Before we talk about the book, let's talk a little bit about you. What's your career look like? Where did you start out? What kind of training did you have? I have a degree in epidemiology from UCLA. And I worked at the Centers for Disease Control in maternal and child health and in birth defects. and then I did a stint where I worked with medical students for a year for them to do a year training at the Centers for Disease Control to see what it was like to work in epidemiology. After that, I worked at the Task Force for Global Health in informatics and then my favorite job of all was when Dave Sensor, who was a former director at CDC, asked me if I'd be interested in conducting oral histories and scientists who were at Centers for Disease Control from the beginning.

1:49He said, because they're all dying, and we need their stories, and so I want someone to collect them. So a big part of that involved polio in those early years. So that's how I got interested in Albert Sabin from the start. Did you do an oral history of him? Albert Saban. No. He was dead by then. He was dead by then because we only started this in 2010. Who did you do? Give you some names. So I talked to Julius Youngner who worked with Jonas Salk. I talked to both Salk's sons, Peter and Daryl. I talked to the people who did lab work at the CDC, Olin Q, Mark Polanch, Larry Anderson. I talked to him a lot.

2:40because a lot of the people at CDC were neighbors and friends because we live in Atlanta. So Larry Schoenberg, Fred Murphy, talk to him, lots of people. So Fred Murphy, is that the same Fred Murphy? Yeah, who's on the Ebola picture, the famous Ebola picture. So he was on a TWIV. Peter Salk was on a TWIV and who did you mention before? Julie Youngner. So I actually went to Pitt to give a Julius Youngner lecture and then I did a podcast with him. And that was very interesting because he was talking about the Cutter incident and he said that Salk ignored him. He went out there and he found problems and Salk just ignored them.

3:37I don't know if that's true. And I've asked other people and they said, who knows? Well, there's a – David Oshinsky, the biography of polio, right? Polio, an American story. An American story. I asked him because I interviewed him a couple of years ago. He said, it's hard to know now if he hid anything. Who knows? Right. Yeah. He was very definite in his opinions about Jonas Salk. Julie Youngner was. Yes. He did not have much respect for him in the end and left his position working with him. I think there are a number of complicating reasons. Well, as you point out in the book, during the release of the IPV clinical trial data in Michigan, they're all waiting to be thanked by Salk, and he didn't thank anyone from his lab.

4:25Yeah. Seems kind of not nice, right? Yeah. Anyway, this is about Albert Sabin. So this is the first definitive biography. For me, this is lovely because I worked on polio and I always thought about Sabin. So this is like being in a candy store, right? All the details here. But it will appeal to you even if you don't know anything about polio.

4:53Why did it take so long for someone to write this? I mean I remember you talking about this eight years ago because we did a Zoom and you asked me some questions and you said you were working on it. Why didn't someone else do it? It seems like he's a pretty consequential person, right? Yeah. That was a big question I had about it and it made me think there was something more to the story that I didn't know. So what I found out is there was a medical historian that tried. He interviewed him over a period of five years. His name was Saul Benison and did a really thorough job interviewing him. And Sabin was characteristically sort of not nice sometimes to him.

5:39And you would get very impatient with him. But Benison just stuck with it and did a really good job. 700 pages of typed up interview notes from this. He planned to write a book about him after all those interviews. And he was taking too long for Sabin's taste. And so he said, I've given you all these years and you still haven't written the book, so I am demanding that you send me all the notes. So he did. And it never got written. And then a couple of other people got interested in writing it. But I think when he was alive, he was too difficult to work with. That's my guess. Did you see these notes from Benison?

6:23Yes. They're still in the archives. Oh, good. So that was a really good resource. Excellent. Right. So I was just looking at the book this morning and I noticed it's Yale University Press. Now that's interesting because there was a history of poliomyelitis by J.R. Paul, published by Yale University Press, and it goes up to Sabin. It goes all through polio history up to IPV, but it ends and now you've picked up the rest of the story. Yeah, there's so much more to him besides just the polio vaccine. That was one of the surprises to me. It was more to Albert Sabin. It did so much more to him. So you are an epidemiologist.

7:05You're not a historian. You're not a journalist. So how did that shape your approach to this? I think I didn't know what I didn't know when I started this. I thought, well, it's probably going to be like writing a thesis or something like that. But it's more involved than that. But I had the background from having talked to so many other people and got their stories about him. And when I would talk to them about polio and if they knew Salk or if they knew Sabin, if they knew Salk, they would say, yeah, you know, he was a nice guy and blah, blah, and he made a good vaccine. But if they knew Albert Sabin, there were stories.

7:51And they were such interesting stories. They were usually, there was some involvement often with his temper or some demeaning thing he did. But they would always finish with what a great scientist he was and the amount of work he did that was astounding. So that's sort of what pushed me over the edge to thinking someone needed to do it and I could give it a try. And maybe that would encourage someone else to do it. So the more I did it, the more it turned into a book, and then I just kept doing it. I got involved with a group called Biographers International. So we meet once a month and once a year and help each other with our projects.

8:41And there's a very small segment of us that work on scientists or math or technology. And those people have helped me through most of the difficulties of this and gave me so much good advice and encouragement that that really made it possible. Did you read any other biographies of scientists to get some ideas? Yeah, especially the Jonas Salk one written by Charlotte de Croce Jacobs. I sort of, I was so in awe of the job she did on that because I had read, there were like six biographies of Salk. But she really dug deep. And she got the science right and she really went deep on him. So she belongs to Biographers International.

9:33So I sort of stalked her for a little while and got her to – she sort of has taken me under her wing and helped me through lots of things. I've read The Splendid Solution. Yeah. He's a Time writer, Time magazine writer. I forget his name, Jeffrey something. It was okay. Kruger. Jeffrey Kruger. Kruger. It was okay, but I didn't read any of the others. Maybe I should read Charlotte's though. Charlotte's is the best. It's the best one. Okay. I will read that. So for this book, you interviewed over 100 people. So you worked through 400 linear feet of archival material. So what's the single most surprising thing you learned about Sabin from going through all that?

10:16The thing that struck me the most was the degree to which he was willing to go to do the science right. and how he could, his sense of curiosity and the way he did things rang true and it was a constant theme his entire life. He had to get it right. He had to find out everything about it. And if there was some tangential thing that was interesting to him, he went with that too. He just had to know everything and he had to find the right answers. He couldn't just do it slipshod. So he would, and he recorded everything. His lab notebooks are still in the archives, and they're beautiful. Bob Chanock called them works of art, and they are.

11:04His handwriting is so legible, and they're just so organized. And he starts by asking a question. Well, how would I find out which strains of polio virus or what I should focus on or something like that? Then he would write how he would figure that out. so it would be recorded for other people in the future. So it's a record of not only his science, but how to arrive at the answers he did. But he also, he was there all the time in the lab. He was before everyone else, and he was there when they were gone. He worked every day of the week, 12 or 14-hour days, and he loved it. Yeah, I haven't seen his notebooks, but you reproduce one page in the book.

11:52and his handwriting is impeccable and everything, all the numbers and nice columns and very neat. When I closed my lab, I threw all my notebooks out. Oh, no. I thought they would not be of interest to anyone, which was a mistake because now we want to get some – my last trainee, Amy Rosenfeld, she's trying to follow up on some things, and it would be nice to have the notebooks. Yeah. You know, there's so many of them, and you get overwhelmed. What do I do with these? so you just throw them out, unfortunately. Well, that's great. That was one of my questions. What do his notebooks tell you about him?

12:29And you just answered that. He was very methodical, right? It's incredible. He did so much of the work himself. He would not give it to his underlings, partly, I think, because he didn't think anyone else could do as good a job as him. But when he worked with the monkeys, he injected them. He did the physical exams on them two or three times a day. to see if they developed polio. And he recorded, each monkey had a number, and he recorded everything about his observations, everything, every detail, because he said you never know what's going to be important, so you have to capture it all. And it has to be reproducible.

13:11So I get the sense that, so I understand this feeling that you have to do it yourself because no one can do it as well. But if you want to train people, you need to let them do it. So I think he was just driven to make a vaccine. I mean, he worked on many things, right? But when it comes to the polio vaccine, he just wanted to do it and not worry about training people. So do you get any sense of him as a trainer or a mentor? Yes. People who he did train talk about it. most, I would say, people who started with him couldn't finish. He was too caustic. He could be cruel. He was known to throw heavy glass ashtrays at people.

14:02There are dents on his walls that you can still see from him. He threw a chair once at someone. nowadays this would be really a problem right I'm sure for the people he was throwing at it it was a problem then too it's not acceptable behavior but you know what you could do in the old days was a lot different from so it should be restricted you shouldn't be able to hurt people like that yeah so he but the people who stayed said they did it because of his training yeah They said that their training from him was superb. And then his challenge to them was to pass it on to other people. And they did.

14:49So Bob Chanak, for instance, was one of his, what do you call it, scientific sons. He was probably his favorite fellow that he worked with. And he did one two-year stint and then signed up for another one, which he said was unheard of. But he did it because it was worth it to him to get the training. So I knew Bob Chanick. We submitted it. So he was in the National Academy. So we submitted a manuscript very early on to Bob Chanick. What was I going to ask? Something about training. He insisted, too, that they keep notebooks like his. Yeah, that's good. I did the same thing. I had a format for notebooks, but after a while, people stopped using it.

15:39And I never yelled at people or enforced. I was just too nice. Well, if you had worked with Albert Sabin, you would have had your notebook inspected every day. Because you would have been required to leave it open so he could see what you wrote for that day. And he would comment on everybody's notebooks. I think that's fine. I don't think that's a problem. Nowadays, the notebooks are all on computer anyway, but you could still do that. You could share it and he could just sit in his office. This is what I wanted to ask you. So he worked in Peter Olitsky's group at the Rockefeller. And I remember he, as you write, he got impatient with him because he was always in his office.

16:18He was never doing – you don't do any work, he said to him. But that's the natural progression of a lab head. You get a lab. You do some work for a while. You establish yourself and you get people who come to work and then you go in your office, right? And Sabin was very different. He didn't respect people who didn't do that. It's interesting. I wonder where that came from because, you know, he first went into a lab really at Rockefeller, right? Well, it wasn't Rockefeller. The story about him that's so interesting is he was going to be a dentist. Right. And his uncle, who did not have a son to pass his business to, talked Albert Saban into going to dental school.

17:01and he would pay for it if he would go into practice with them. Right. Then in 1926, he read a book called Microbe Hunters by Paul DeCruyfe. And he put that book down and never looked back. He was going to do medical research and there was no other path for him. Yeah. And he had to do it right then. So he went to one of his teachers that he had had during dental school who was a lab person. and he went into his office. His name was William Park. The vaccine failure park, right? Yes, that same guy. So he was also the, ran the lab for the New York Health Department. So he had a couple of labs, and so St.

17:54Louis was thinking to himself, well, he's got labs. I can just go in there and learn how to do everything. So he knocked at Dr. Paul's door and said, without any preamble, he said, I need to do some medical research and I need a lab space. So Dr. Paul said, well, what's your qualifications? What do you know? And he didn't know anything. He said, I don't know anything. But how am I going to learn if I don't go in a lab and do it? So he passed him off to one of his underlings. And that guy had no problems dispatching him. He said, no, you just go to more school and then you'll get to this. So he went right back to Dr.

18:32Paul and said, I need to do this. I have this terrific compulsion. I have to do it now. So he gave him some space and he started asking questions and observing. And he had a paper out as a 21-year-old undergraduate. Amazing. So for me, I read Fever, the story of Lassa virus discovery in Nigeria in the 60s. And I said, I need to be a virologist. So I understand that very well, that compulsion. But, you know, this idea of walking into a lab, I've heard this before. So Harold Varmus, right, Nobel laureate, he's a young guy and he said he packed up his stuff and went to the West Coast because he wanted to be there and do science.

19:18And he walks into the hallway in UCSF and he finds Michael Bishop's door and walks in and says, I'd be interested in doing some research with you. And so Mike Bishop talks to him and says, yeah, OK, we can do that. But he was nice about it. He didn't say I have to do this. Right. I have this compulsion to do it. So I think if you're nice, it can work. Right. Right. So, yes, he is described as driven by compulsion with a fierce joy in discovery. And you write about that in the book. How did that shape the science for better or worse? Do you think it blinded him sometimes to his own limitations?

20:01Yeah. I think that he, for almost everything, he would just go by the facts. And if his hypothesis proved not to be what he expected, he admitted that and was glad to learn from it and taught people that that is how you learn. Sometimes you fail or sometimes unexpected things happen. But there was one area where he could not admit that he was wrong. And that was with his vaccine that occasionally would cause polio disease in children who got it because it would revert back to the virulent stage. He used every excuse to explain it away that it didn't cause polio. He said it could be a lot of other things.

20:52There are other neurodegenerative diseases. This could be Guillain-Barre. So he never did admit it to the day he died. But he probably knew it, right? I think he knew it. I mean, today it's all about reversion of OPV, and we know very well. But we knew in the 80s that it was reverting as well. But one thing I learned in the book that I didn't know. So I knew that he had gone to the Soviet Union with his vaccines, and they put him in millions of recipients with Chumakov, right? He directed the clinical trial and it ended up being safe and protective and those data helped get it licensed in the US.

21:36And then they sent Dorothy Horstman there to look at the data. And I never understood why they didn't have any vaccine-associated polio. And I think you point out someone said we – someone in Soviet Union said we can't reveal this. and there was probably some vaccine-associated polio, but they just didn't tell anyone, right? Yeah, that's right. So now I understand. It's been years. I never could understand how they could put it into 100 million kids, right, something like that, because the rate is one case of paralysis per one to two million doses. So you should have seen it, right? And they did.

22:13Yeah. Yeah. People did correct that later, but at the time they didn't. I gave a lecture in Steve Morse's course at Columbia on the history of polio, and this is going to be now part of it. I always say I don't know what Dorothy Horstman was looking at, but she was looking at what they gave her, and that's why, right? And I think she suspected this because they knew. When she went over, she knew, but she could never get anyone to talk about it, and all their records were spotless. I wonder if the records still exist. I don't know. Because we've learned a lot about the Soviet space program since the dissolution, right, of the Soviet Union.

22:56And we learned all the failures they had and trying to get to the moon and so forth, which they all hid very well. But now – so I wonder if we could – maybe you should go there and get the record. Well, you're not allowed to travel there. So one of my other – so I was a big fan of Sabin because he made these vaccines. I also was a fan of Max Tyler. And I don't know if you came across Max Tyler in your research, right? So he made the first attenuated infectious vaccine, the yellow fever vaccine. Were they contemporaries at Rockefeller? They were. And Sabin talked about how he used to go into Max Tyler's office because he would sit in his chair with his big long legs up on his desk and think out loud.

23:46and talk through how he was going to do things with this yellow fever vaccine. And he would just learn from him. And he would ask questions. And they would just talk. And that's how they sort of – he got influenced by Max Tyler's methodology from an early time. But that was an important thing for him. Yeah. I mean, I think that must have influenced him because it was an attenuated vaccine. And that's probably where he got the idea to do it with polio, right? Now, at the time, Kuprowski, Hillary Kuprowski was also developing an attenuated polio vaccine. I would guess from being influenced by Max Tyler as well.

24:28But Sabin never gave him any credit. And Kuprowski was the first to test it in people, even though it was in this horrible population of children who had… That's worth the village. Yes. With all kinds of neural problems. Yeah. So why didn't – in your book, you have this place where Kuprowski is presenting the data at a talk and he's – he fed the kids a homogenate of brain that had – from an animal that had been infected, right? What a horrible thing. And Sabin stands up and says, why did you do that? Yeah. Yeah. How dare you? Yeah. Those are children. He was so incensed. Yeah. Do you have any sense for why he didn't say, yeah, Kuprowski made the first attenuated vaccine?

25:16I think that he didn't give him credit for being a very good scientist. He thought he did things in sort of a slipshod way. Did you read Kuprowski's biography? The first pages where they're drinking the brain extract and his assistant says, you want another? And Kuprowski says, no, I'm driving. Yeah. That's great, isn't it? I love that story. Sorry, I interrupted you. Yeah. So, yeah, he and Norton was the name of the lab assistant. Right. And they blended the rat brains up in the blender, and it was a big oily glop, and they both drank it. Yep. They watched each other. So that's what the person— So he didn't think Kapraski was very good.

26:06That's the bottom line. He didn't, yeah. And I think plus he was sort of, he had sort of a playboy reputation. Kowalski for sure, yeah. And for whatever reason, he was not as respected in the scientific world. People who knew the different personalities and the way they did science would have ranked Albert Sabin at the top. And they would have ranked others below him because no one could top his methodology. So who did Sabin admire as a scientist? He, I think, admired Landsteiner, who discovered the first, the poliovirus and blood groups. Although I think he was also at the Rockefeller Institute.

26:57And from what you write, he was pretty abrasive himself. Yes. Landsteiner. Maybe Sabin picked a little of that up from him. Yeah. Maybe so. Anyone else? Let's see. He admired Mitchell, who was at Cincinnati and recruited him to University of Cincinnati as a scientist and as a person. He admired him a lot. So I saw him interact with David Baltimore. David Baltimore was a Nobel laureate, and I think he respected that and appreciated that. He said there were these molecular biologists, right? There was Sabin who was a virologist who studied vaccines and their pathogenesis. And then I remember in a letter, the otherwise excellent molecular biologists who don't know anything about pathogenesis, right?

27:51But he respected David very much. So let's talk a little bit about Salk versus Sabin, right? This was an incredibly contentious era in science where Salk makes an activated polio vaccine. It's licensed. It's used for a number of years. Sabin thinks it's garbage. It's kitchen chemistry. He didn't invent anything, right? And then at meetings, they're always arguing. I went to one meeting in 1981 where they were both there still arguing so many years later. And eventually, Sabin's vaccine replaces Salk, which must have been so painful for Salk. So give me your thoughts about this debate. Was it a real debate or could we have had both vaccines?

28:45Probably not. I think one of the main things with the Salk vaccine was that it had been in use from 1955 up to 1960. And still in 1959, there were 6 ,000 cases of polio. So it wasn't working as well as they hoped. Were those immunized kids? In immunized kids. So one of the things is that the difference between Salk and Sabin in some of this is that Sabin followed through on everything. He didn't just invent it and let it go. He had to see where it was manufactured, how it was manufactured, how it was administered, and then he would follow up. He just had to do those things to be sure it was good.

29:38And Salk sort of, he invented it, and then the clinical trial that involved over a million kids was out of his hands. It was done by Tommy Francis. As it should have been, right? Yes, as it should have been. And they had a case control study. Whereas Salk would have just given it to everybody, but he knew in the end that that was the right thing to do. So they had different strategies. But then when Sabin had his vaccine tested in the Soviet Union, and it wasn't a clinical trial. It was just everyone got it. There was no procedure. There was no control. So I misspoke earlier. Okay. Yeah. So he had 100 million people who had gotten his vaccine, and it stopped the epidemics and the tracks because it works at the gut level where the vaccine rose.

30:34So he came back with this data and it was just no contest. The people who make those decisions in the public health department said, you know, we've got this superior vaccine and we're going to switch to that because it works. So Sabin had no control over the program in the Soviet Union, right? He did and he didn't. Chumakov was the one he taught to manufacture it. But he and Chumacoff became lifelong friends. And both of them were really good scientists. Both of them had terrible tempers, but they admired each other. So they would go and have these long dinners together and drink Aquavit and talk about communism versus capitalism.

31:24So they had this whole background personality thing going for them.

31:32And Jim Koff's wife, Marina Boroshilova, was also an excellent virologist. So he worked with them. He taught them how to – he gave them the seed viruses. Right. He carried them in his pocket – or he gave them seed viruses to carry in their pockets after they visited. You say he put it in his pocket on the airplane. Yes. My gosh. Try doing that today. I know. Oh. So they had Sabin seed viruses. But then he gave them the credit for making the vaccine in their own country. But he oversaw everything. And they worked well together. And then he oversaw the administration. It was his idea to do the mass vaccination programs just in a short period of time, vaccinate everybody.

32:21And because it was the Soviet Union and you did what you were told they were able to do that. So it stopped their epidemics. And with that amount of proof and data, there was just no question that people could see that that worked better. You must have spoken with Khoishchia Chumakov, right? Because he's here in the US, right? He was at the FDA for many years. So he said his mother gave him like 60 doses of OPV over his childhood because they found that for a couple of months it would inhibit influenza and other infections. Yeah. They were the most vaccinated kids in the whole world because she gave it to all their kids because she felt that it developed their immune system to the point that it would resist other respiratory viruses as well as a polio virus.

33:11And he said, we were really healthy, but they got it every year. I don't know if you remember at the beginning of COVID, before we had COVID vaccines, people, I think it was Bob Gallo, well, Kostya and Bob Gallo wanted to do a clinical trial using polio vaccine to prevent COVID for a few months. But they could never get the funding to do that, right? But yeah, I think he even bled himself in isolated monoclonal antibodies, you know, against poliovirus because of this extensive immunization history. So this is done. This USSR collaboration was done at the height of the Cold War. We have the McCarthy era going, how did this happen?

33:56You would think that the State Department would not let this happen. So how did it happen? Yeah. And it was kind of done under the radar. So first, the Soviet Union contacted the State Department to see if it would be possible to send their scientists over to learn how they made the polio vaccine because they were being decimated by these polio epidemics. And the State Department said yes. They had certain restrictions on them and they were observed constantly. They couldn't fly on an airplane for whatever reason. There were certain cities they couldn't get near. But otherwise, they went to visit Salk's lab and Sabin's lab.

34:40They met John Enders in Boston, and they learned from each of them what they were doing. And they were told to give them the information you have. And they thought that that would be a good thing. and Sabin always said that science should be political. It should be available to everyone with no politics involved. And he felt that way even before all this began, but even more afterwards. So they came over and then they invited both Salk and Sabin back to the Soviet Union for a meeting they were going to have about polio and the problems they were having it. that June of 1956. So Jonah Salk's wife was tired of him not being home ever, and she said, no, you are not going to the Soviet Union.

35:37But Salk or Sabin was happy to go, and his family was actually happy for him to go. So he went, and that sort of led to the further education about his vaccine, and how it worked and how it could work for them. So it was sort of a turning point. And the politics only played out because both of them were being spied on. And there were subtle things where they found out. And when Sabin came back to the United States after his first trip there, the State Department came in to talk to him and they thought, Oh, I must have done something wrong. They're not going to let me go back. So they talked to him and they knew every city he'd been to.

36:29They knew everything he said. And they said, yeah, we know. You said to them, I empathize with you. You're having this problem. And he said, does that mean I can't go back? They said, no, absolutely not. You go back.

36:44Even though there's no Soviet Union, I don't think that there would be this kind of collaboration today, unfortunately. It doesn't seem like it, does it? No. I mean, during COVID, the Russians made their own vaccines. I think their science is sufficiently advanced that they can do that. But if something were developed in the U.S. that they wanted, they would just do it themselves. And that's what China does as well, many other countries. You read the literature and you can reproduce it. So the fact that Salk didn't go, I don't think it mattered because they had used IPV in the Soviet Union. It didn't seem to work, right?

37:20Right. Yeah. There's a guy named Smuridinsiv. Virologist, right? Yeah. Also sort of an interesting character. But he lived in St. Petersburg. That was Leningrad at the time. And they were having horrible epidemics there. He used the Salk vaccine because they wanted to use what was being used in the United States because if it was good enough for the United States, it was good enough for the Soviet Union. So after he had used it, he saw that it wasn't stopping their epidemics and it wasn't even preventing polio in everyone. So he reported that to Chumakov. And Chumakov decided, you know, we've invested in these labs that make the Salk vaccine.

38:09But I want to try the Sabin vaccine. So that's when they stepped up their manufacturing of the Sabin vaccine and used it with great success. So you write that Tony Fauci has described him as having an unlikely juxtaposition of genius, profound empathy and kindness and infamous abrasiveness. And I – from my experience, I knew he could be abrasive. but the extent of it is much greater in the book. So do you think – well, first of all, how do you deal with that in a biography without making him look horrible? There's no question of making him look horrible. He made himself – You just report the facts, right?

38:56Yeah. And a lot of it was in his own words. There were the words of people he worked with. But he told on himself too. So I just wrote what he said and what other people said. So there's no judgment. There's no way to know another person really. But I was curious about him for that reason. I've always been curious about people who behave badly, who are professionals, and who let themselves – it seems like a luxury to be able to express your anger just so freely and not worry about the consequences. I just didn't understand it. I couldn't – I don't understand people like that. So part of it was trying to figure out how they justify that in their behavior and why people put up with it.

39:48So that was an interesting process to learn more about it. I never encountered anyone in my career that was abusive or angry or had such a temper. I mean little incidents here and there but not a consistent behavior like he showed. Do you think this ever set science back at any point because of his behavior? I think he would say he tried to impose his design on some places like in Brazil. He volunteered a lot of his time and he gave all of his vaccine. He gave freely. He never sold it. So he had that side of him. But you paid a price for working with him. So he would go to Brazil, for instance, when they were having outbreaks, and he'd say, well, I am going to volunteer my time to be a consultant, and I will help you.

40:44But what he really wanted to do was go in and tell them what to do and how to do it. So it didn't always work. He was so surprised sometimes when he'd say, okay, you need to do this, this, and this. And they'd say, well, either they can't do that. They don't have the resources or they don't feel they need to do that right then. And he would get angry and insist still on having his way. And at one point, he was asked to leave Brazil. So he wrote this newspaper article about how unfair it was and how they suffered because of it. So, you know, but I think they did get the job done without him. And they used his vaccine and his methodology.

41:33I mean, that was the first indication that mass vaccination could eliminate the disease, right? They had lots of polio in Brazil and then twice a year mass immunizations and eventually there was very little polio. And that's what WHO relied on to say in 1988 that we could eradicate polio, poliomyelitis. And unfortunately, they let poliovirus slip in there. But we can talk about that later. Well, the first country where he saw it was Cuba. He went over. He was invited by Fidel Castro. He went over and they had mass vaccination days. Right. Three days. And they wiped it out of the country. Yeah.

42:17Well, in fact, that's – we were talking about this before. That's how he saw OPV being used in mass campaigns where you immunize a lot of people at once, not little things here and there like the WHO does mop-up campaigns. When there's an outbreak, they go in and they – he would disagree with this very much. And this fosters vaccine-derived paralysis because not everyone's immunized and the virus can move pretty quickly. and if you're not immunized, you're going to get paralysis.

42:51So there's a lot in the book about him and his family. I didn't know anything about him and his family. So the public scientists view him as a really good scientist, maybe a genius. How did his family view him? Well, his family, first of all, he married when he was 29. He married a woman he knew for two weeks. And she was from a family of Christian scientists who don't believe in using doctors.

43:31But he married her after he knew her one month. And she moved from a small town in the Midwest to be with him in New York. And they made a go of it for a while. But he was gone almost all the time. That was when he was at the Rockefeller Institute. And so they were married during World War II when he volunteered to be in the service. And they wanted children, but they just were not able to have them. So after 15 years of marriage, they went to Europe together. She had never been, and there was a polio meeting. And his cousin, Saul Krugman, gave him a bottle of champagne and told him, Okay, now get busy.

44:19Let's have you make a baby here. So she started asking for really strange foods on the way back, and her behavior was a little different. He'd say, Sylvia, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were pregnant. And she was. 15 years after their marriage 15 years after their marriage and that's when their daughter Debbie was born and then 18 months later they had daughter Amy so he was thrilled to have children and he said his daughters were his greatest achievement but they fought all the time, especially as teenagers. And it was clear to them that he would prefer that they were boys. And that was hard for both of them.

45:18But he was very hard on them and on their mother. And the mother had depressive disorder. And it didn't help to be married to someone like him. She didn't ever get the help she needed. And there wasn't. There wasn't much to be done for it in those days anyway. But when the girls were 16 and 14, their mother committed suicide. And she blamed Albert for some of the reasons she was so depressed. And the daughters did too. And throughout their lives, they had various warming up periods. But mostly they were estranged because he was so hard on them. to the extent that when he was in his final years and having lots of health problems, they would go help him, but then he would end up just screaming at them.

46:17They had young families of their own to take care of, so they just left. And in the end, he cut them out of his will, and they were mostly estranged. So after his wife committed suicide, did he stay single for long? Nope. He did not. He married nine months later to a woman, his second wife, Jane Warner, who was married to the biggest savings and loan criminal, Marvin Warner, in Ohio's history. And so she was not quite divorced from him yet. And so they had to wait for a little bit for that divorce to be final, and they married. Okay. And how long did that marriage last? Three years. And why did it end?

47:10What was the problem? They both had similar personalities. They both liked to yell and scream at the other, and both were sort of perfectionists in their own realms. She also had a young son, and Albert figured he could tell her how to raise her son. And Marvin Warner as well. He was very direct about it. And so that didn't work very well. This is enjoyable for me because I didn't know any of this, right? Because, I mean, I saw him as a scientist and I didn't know anything about it. I mean, the idea that he would meet someone and get married in two weeks, I would never have thought because he was such a precise analytical scientist.

47:59And this means he's letting his emotions take over, which, well, I guess he was human in the end. I guess. So they get divorced and then he has a third wife, right? How did that happen? How long later and how did that happen? Oh, within a year. Within a year. Ah. So Albert liked company, but he was gone all day. Although I guess as he got older, he needed to have someone travel with him, right? Well, I think he may have even mellowed a bit. At the time that he divorced from Jane Warner, he had taken a position as president of the Weizmann Institute in Israel. And part of the reason their marriage broke Rappel was because she was not willing to move to Israel.

48:44She had this young son that the father had to have permission to see too. So she really couldn't, but she didn't want to either. Right. Right. So that led to their divorce. He began having heart problems during that time. But one of his jobs as president of the Wiseman Institute was to continue to raise money to keep it running. And he went to a meeting in Brazil that they hosted for him. He was known everywhere just because he had this look. He had the white hair and the white beard and he was known as sort of the savior. women in different countries would walk up and kiss his hand when they saw him.

49:26And he kind of liked that kind of treatment. So at this reception, both he and his third wife said they looked across the room and saw each other. And that was kind of the beginning. So he asked her if she could have lunch with him at the reception. So they talked for a little bit. And then they started writing these love letters to each other. She joined him in Israel for a bit. And then he had to have quadruple bypass. And so after he had that, she came and helped with his recuperation. And she was still married, although she had been estranged from her husband for years. but she was able to get that annulled and then the two of them, Sabin and Heloisa, got married.

50:23And she worshipped him. She would have done anything for him. He was probably easier on her but she did not remain unscathed either. He would yell at her sometimes and demean her. But she was willing to put up with it because she worshipped him. And she survives him to this day, right? She died a couple years ago. Okay. And she was very involved with the Sabin Vaccine Institute and with the archives in Cincinnati. So she was his proponent even after he died from 1993 on after he died. She was his spokesperson. And she went all over the place still promoting his vaccine and talking about what a great man he was.

51:15She helped get him into Arlington National Cemetery. area. That's where he is, and yes. But he actually qualified because he was a World War II hero. Okay. What did he do during World War II? Tell us. Well, first of all, he volunteered to enlist. He didn't have to. He was already on a board of virologists who was commissioned by the Army to figure out how to keep the troops safe from tropical diseases to which they would be exposed in the Pacific Theater because they had no previous exposure. It was just wiping people out. And they knew this from the Brits who were already over there and involved.

52:01So they would get sandfly fever and it would just lay them flat for, you know, a week or two weeks. And if they were in combat, then the enemy, there would be no resistance. So his job was to figure out how to protect them as much as he could. But he didn't want to do it from the sidelines. He wanted to be right there. So the only way he sought to do that was by enlisting. And he didn't want to just enlist and be peripherally involved. He wanted to be in these research tents right by the front lines. So he essentially put his life on the line to try to develop a rudimentary vaccine or other preventive measures, what kind of insecticides would work on the mosquitoes that spread diseases or whatever could be done to protect them.

52:53He was there to figure that out. And he did put his life on the line. He had some risks that almost cost him his life. I think most people don't know that aspect of his history and also they assume that he wasn't qualified for Arlington but somehow his wife convinced – I think it was Bill Clinton at the time who was president, right? To get him in there. Yeah. But as you say, he was qualified. No, he qualified. Okay. Yeah. But she got him a – I think what she sort of campaigned for was a Medal of Freedom. Mm-hmm. And she wrote to Strom Thurmond, I think. They lived in South Carolina at the time.

53:34And she talked it up and then he. Okay. Yeah. Now, in your book, you talk about how Sabin could give us lessons in anti-vaccine sentiment and how to deal with it and resurgence of diseases. How do you think he would view what we're going through today, which is exactly that huge anti-vaccine sentiment, increased infectious diseases in the U.S., measles, influenza, et cetera? How would he deal with that? Because he was obviously a proponent of vaccination. I think for him there would be no holds barred. He would be on attack mode is my guess. Wouldn't you? Totally. I mean, I say all the time, I wish Sabin were alive to deal with these idiots.

54:31Yeah. He would be writing editorials. Yep. He would be calling people up and reaming them out to people. Yes. And he would go to Congress and testify. He did a lot of that when he was alive on various things, including the Vietnam War and aging issues and retirement, voluntary retirement, lots of issues that he testified before Congress. But I see him as not holding anything back. Yeah, I often say I wish he were alive because I think he was so passionate about his cause, whatever it was, that this would just piss him off and he would, yeah, just full out attack. I don't know if it would do any good because the anti-vaccine movement is very well organized.

55:31It's highly funded and so forth. But it would really help because there's no one doing that today. Right? There's no one figure. I mean, Tony Fauci ostensibly could, but he's afraid because – well, he shouldn't be because he's been pardoned, right? He shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he should be speaking out. But no one would listen because of the problems during COVID. I don't see anyone else who could substitute. I think Paul Offit does. He says that he talked to RFK Jr. extensively. Yes, yes. We do a podcast together. He always tells me, but he doesn't listen to them. No, he doesn't. And the same thing, he had Paul Offit talk to Cassidy, Senator Cassidy, for hours and hours.

56:24And he said he thought he was convinced not to vote for R.K. Jr., but didn't. In the end, he voted for him. But I don't know that they are as outspoken. I don't know if anybody would be as outspoken as Sabin. No, not at all. And Boloff has difficulties because he made a vaccine and he's profited from it, whereas Sabin didn't profit from it. And so he's always criticized for that, right? And this is so – he tries to – he gets death threats also. So he tries to keep a low profile. I'm going to talk a little bit about eradication. So in 1988, WHO said we're going to eradicate poliomyelitis. And so Albert was still alive at the time.

57:16Did he get involved in that? And if so, what did he think about it? Do you know? Yeah, he was all for it. He initially didn't think it could be done. But the more he looked into it, he said, yes, this could be done. Because, you know, they were close to having eradicated in the whole Western Hemisphere at that point. But, you know, he looked at countries like India and just thought, how is that even going to happen? But it did. and I think he believed it could happen and he was right in there. He did things like in El Salvador, for instance, he proposed a national vaccination day, but they would have to stop fighting because there was a civil war going on in El Salvador.

58:11and he got them to agree to stop fighting for one whole day just for the purpose of vaccinating the children. And they did. Some of the soldiers even gave some of the vaccines. And he was there lending his name and his support. Well, if he were around, maybe he could go to Afghanistan and Pakistan and do a similar thing. I mean, you know, there's people in that country think polio is not a problem. They have other problems. Yeah. Right? So that's a big issue. Now, the problem with eradication today is his vaccine, actually. So I wonder what – I mean, he would be confronted if he were still alive.

58:52He would be confronted with very clear facts that most of the polio in the world now is caused by his vaccine. Thousands and thousands of cases. And so types 2 and 3 have been eradicated. Type 1 circulates, but very few cases. The rest are caused by the type 2 component. And you have to wonder what he would – I mean, he would almost feel like Salk when the vaccine was switched, that his vaccine is paralyzing all these children. You ever thought about that? Yeah. Yeah, and I actually asked Dr. Fauci about it because Tony Fauci and Albert Sabin were friends for 20 years. And I said, that's one thing I cannot figure out about Sabin.

59:45He was so precise about science and so insistent that the facts have to be documented. He must have known that his vaccine caused some cases. Yes, of course. And he said he thinks that his ego would not let him accept that. Wow. So that's an example of where his personality got in the way of science, right? Because your ego shouldn't. But unfortunately, this happens a lot in science, as you may know, right? Scientists don't like to give up a hypothesis. It's theirs. They've worked on it all their life. Even when their data says it's not right, they will continue because of their ego. Yeah. But unfortunately, it's because of his vaccine.

1:00:28So we've reduced wild-type polio viruses, but disease continues and the viruses continue to circulate. Much of the world uses IPV where you can be infected and spread virus. So we're in a conundrum now. Yeah. And I don't think it's eradicable anymore. You don't? No. Certainly the disease could be if you immunized everyone. But there was just an article that we did recently in the Central African Republic. They can't even immunize half of the population with OPV, which is easy to give. Right? There's so much disruption in these countries. So I don't know how you would do it. And it was so close.

1:01:15There's only Pakistan and Afghanistan. There were 26 cases. One year. Yeah, well, that was before they withdrew the type 2 from OPV. And that was a huge blunder because it made a type 2 immunity gap. And now most of those cases are caused by the vaccine circulating. And, you know, as you point out in the book, a new vaccine, a more improved vaccine was made. But it's marginally better. It doesn't solve the problem. Yeah. So what do we do? Well, we have a vaccine now that doesn't cause polio. We could use IPV globally, but everyone tells me it's not feasible to do that. And I understand the limitations of a needle and a healthcare person who knows how to inject.

1:01:56We need new polio vaccines. But CDC and WHO have decided no more polio research, you know, and you can't work on it unless you're a special laboratory. And so it's going to be very hard to make a new vaccine. And here's the other thing that's really important. Most of the eradication effort has been supported by the Gates Foundation. So NOPV2 development was funded,$3 billion funded by Gates. Gates is sunsetting in 2045. No more Gates money. Do you know what that means? No more vaccines, polio vaccines and others for the world. No more polio research. So we better get our act together by 2045.

1:02:42Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Sorry. This is your interview, not mine.

1:02:51So do you want to ask me anything? You said you might want to. I wanted to know because you knew him. I did. I was lucky to meet him a couple of times. I wanted you to tell about what that was like and if he influenced you and how. I think he influenced me in a major way because when I went to Columbia in 1982, I wanted to study poliomyelitis in an animal model and not non-human primates. So we made a transgenic mouse model and we used that for many years. But before we made that, I had, in David Baltimore's lab, started working on the Lansing strain of poliovirus, which had been adapted to mice in the 30s by Charles Armstrong, right, by passage from mouse to mouse.

1:03:37And you could inject this into the brain of mice and they would develop polio. So in 1981, I went to a meeting in – I think it was in D.C. But anyway, Salk and Sabin were there. and at the break, lunch break, Saban is standing down there by himself, sitting. And I'm like, can I go talk to him? Do you know how hard it was for me to do that? I was a brand new professor just out of a postdoc and I was a shy person. So I said, I need to do this. So I went down. I said, hello, I'm so-and-so. I did this. And he knew me because of the work I did with David Baltimore. So he said, yes, I know your work very well.

1:04:25He'd written about it in this letter to Olin Q that we talked about. I said, well, I have this idea. I wanted to ask you about it. And I thought if I asked for advice, he might be more receptive, right? And so I said, I want to work on the Lansing strain. I want to find out why it can infect mice. And he said, well, I think you can get an answer and it would be really quick. but remember it is mice and it's not humans. So we talked a little bit about that. And then he had a banana. He said, I'm sorry, I have to go eat my lunch now. So I left. So that was my first. So we started to work on Lansing and I sent him some papers and he just destroyed them.

1:05:09He said, you have no idea what you're talking about. He said, you're mapping neurovirulence of Lansing in mice. He said, you have no appreciation for the spectrum of neurovirulence, for what it means to be in different kinds of animals. It's not going to be the same in mice as it is in non-human primates and humans. And, okay, I didn't get offended by the words because he was right, and I didn't know this. Who else am I going to learn this from? There's nobody else around really studying the pathogenesis. So I took it to heart, and it really influenced. And we made these transgenic mice, and I always remembered what Sabin had told me about them.

1:05:48And he never saw the transgenic mouse results, I think, but it did correspond with him a few more times and I saw him at various meetings. So I would say I read a lot of his papers. He actually would send me some underlined with notes in the margin, right? He sent me a few. First his letters were typed and then he didn't have an assistant anymore so he would handwrite them. And I feel honored that he took an interest. I have all the letters here still. I think they're in some archive somewhere as well. And I learned a lot from him for sure. And I think about him a lot when we – especially nowadays with this anti-vaccine sentiment as we said before.

1:06:29I wish he could set these people straight. So your book is great for me because it really gives me insight into him. I remember once at a meeting, he was telling me about his recovery from Guillain-Barre, which you talk about in the book. He said, I worked on paralytic disease all my life and then I get it. He said it was just moving up my body and it was so painful. He said, that's why I have this cane now. I have to use this all the time. I gave a talk where he was sitting in the front row. Can you imagine how imposing? This is already I'm a bit on in my career. and he would stand up and make a statement.

1:07:11He didn't ask any questions. He just made statements. And so, yeah, I was pretty lucky to have some interactions with him. I wish I had more, but that's, you know, he was pretty much at the end of his. So I went to Columbia in 82. So he's kind of at the end of things. He always would write at the end of his letters, I'm going to be 83 next week and I don't expect to be around much longer. Yeah. Yeah. We could use him now, couldn't we? I would love to see him. Yes, I would. I would really love to see him. Is there anything I've missed that you wanted to talk about, about Albert, about the book?

1:07:52I just think that he somehow getting missed was a terrible thing. And I think we have a lot to learn from him still and be entertained at the same time because, honestly, there was no time in his life that there weren't stories and examples of him as a scientist and as a person that are not fascinating. He is a character and I hope that this is just the start, that other people will write about him and research him and write about more of the specialty areas that I didn't get into because he's worth it. So J.R. Paul's The History of Polymyelitis is a very scientific book, right? So maybe that's what we could use for Albert.

1:08:42Now, one that looks at his scientific work in some detail, but that would take someone who cares and understands it. I mean, I could do it, but I'm not a biographer, right? Anyway, Albert Sabin by Karen Torgele. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was fun talking with you. Thanks. So that is a special episode of TWIV. You can find the show notes at microbe.tv slash TWIV. If you enjoy these programs, we'd love to have your support. As you know, Microbe TV is a nonprofit entity, and in the U.S., your donations are federal, U.S. tax deductible. I'm Vincent Racaniello. You can find me at microbe.tv.

1:09:30I'd like to thank the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology for their support of TWIV Ronald Jenkes for the music and Jolene Ramsey for the timestamps. You've been listening to This Week in Virology. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week. Another TWIV is viral.