American History Tellers - Conquering Polio | There Is No Patent | 4

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

In the early 1950s, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin were in a race to develop a vaccine against polio. While Salk’s killed-virus vaccine was the first to be distributed, Sabin continued working to perfect his own approach. In the end, Sabin’s oral polio vaccine—made from a weakened live virus—proved easier to administer and was ultimately distributed far more widely, though his name never achieved the same recognition. In this episode, Lindsay is joined by epidemiologist and oral historian Karen Torghele. Her book Albert Sabin: The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer is due to be published by Yale University Press in June of 2026. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American history tellers. Our History, Your Story. In 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.

But Saborne 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 Torgaley is an epidemiologist and oral historian. Her book, Albert Savin, The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer, is due to be published by Yale University Press in June of 26. Our conversation is next. Karen Torgailey, 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 sulk 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. So because he was crying out, I was crying, and I didn't understand why my dad was doing something that would hurt him or what

was going on. And 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. And 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 Hulke and Hilary Kupowski and some of the others. And if they knew them, it didn't seem to make a big impression on them, that if I asked them about Albert Sabin, I could tell right away just by their body 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.

They were so deep in the paper. He 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 this surveillance test by Obert 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 Saban. Let's begin with his upbringing. What was his youth like? And how did he eventually get into virology? Well, 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 him. the Jewish people, and especially in their little town of Beelostock, 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 Saban 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. And 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. And 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 Beelastock. 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? He 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 go into practice with him later in life, that he would pay for all of his expenses. He got two or three years of dental school background and training. Then in 1926, he read a book called The Microbe Hunters by Paul DeKreif. 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 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 had this terrific compulsion to be a medical researcher and I need to start now. And I need to have some lab space. So 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 go into 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. out what kind of bacteria pneumonia patients had that was making them sick. So there were different strains of pneumococcus pneumonia, which bacteria. And 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 injected 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 on their abdomens for two or three hours. And 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. They 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?

And 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 need to specialize in polio because it took such a toll every 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 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. No 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 this 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-feated disease. What did Albert Savan do during this period? During 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 fever. He looked into dengue and encephalitis and polio. He 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 the ADT, 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. Hello American History Tellers, listeners. I have an exciting announcement. I am going on tour, coming to a theater near you. The very first show will be at the Granada Theater in Dallas, Texas, on March 6th. It's going to be a thrilling evening of history, storytelling, and music with a full band behind me as we look back to explore the days that made America. And they aren't the days you might think. Sure, everyone knows July 4, 1776, but there are many other days that are maybe even more influential. So come out to see me live in Dallas or for information on tickets and upcoming dates,

go to American History Live.com. That's American History Live.com. Come see my days that made America tour live on stage. Go to American History Live.com. After World War II, fascism had been defeated, but polio had not. And the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis of the March of Dimes wanted researchers to develop a vaccine and they wanted it quickly. Jonas saw, 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 biologist than Salk. By that time, Albert Sabein had five years

of research that he did at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, which was a very elite group of scientists, Jonas 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 and 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. And 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. And 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 I 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. And 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 caused disease and then a booster. So 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 Sabein 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 witnessing.

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. And 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. Saban 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. be one poliovirus vaccine. And so, of course, each of them thought it should be theirs. But it was the SOC vaccine that was first. In April 1954, field trials were conducted on hundreds of thousands of children in the United States. And a year later, on April 12, 1955, the findings

were announced at a dramatic press conference. But 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. He still had a couple of years ago 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 Chilicothe, Ohio, and that would be his first big trial on humans. And it would prove to be very successful. But what 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. And 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 SABN vaccine was ready to be used and had been tested on people in Eastern Europe. So you say Saven tested his oral polio vaccine in Eastern Europe, but this is during the Cold War. Where 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 and 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 Chumukov and his wife, Marina Voroshalova, were two of the most famous scientists in Russia. They came over with several other people, and of course with the KGB watching them and are 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.

So when they went back to Russia, both for Shalov and Chumukov had files 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. Jim Koff, he wanted to give the, the Sabin vaccine to the people because you could see that it was a superior vaccine and that it would stop the epidemics that they were in danger of having. The 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 root instead of by the respiratory route. Now, Chumukov 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. So you've set the stage. It's late 1950s in the USSR during the Cold War.

And Russian virologist Mikhail Chumikov has samples. of Albert Saban's oral polio vaccine, the understanding of how to manufacture it, everything he needs for a mass vaccination campaign, but he can't get approval for it. What was the problem? How did he get around it? There was someone who was Chumakov Superior,

whose name was Boris Petrovsky, who happened to be a former friend of Chumukovs, but who began to resent him because he had sort of insulted him in front of some of their peers. He called him an idiot for something he had and he never forgave Chumakov for that. So to get permission to give the vaccine in all of Russia, Chumukov had to get Petrovsky's permission to do it. And Petrovsky was not willing to do that.

That was very frustrating for Mikhail Chumakov, and he didn't know how he was going to get around that problem. But there was a system that he and Sabin sort of talked about and worked out. And that was that at that time, there was a red telephone in the offices of top officials that went straight to the Politburo or the ruling people in the Soviet Union. And he knew where some of those red phones were, that he was not allowed to use himself. But he knew if he could get a hold of this guy named Anastus Mikoyen, who was in charge of public health in the whole Soviet Union,

he might have a chance of convincing him to go over Petrovsky's head, and give them permission to start. They had known each other, they had met. Chumukov knew that McCoyen had grandchildren that he wanted protected from polio more than anything. What Chumukov did was he went to one of the offices where he knew there was a red phone and sat until the receptionist, stepped away from her desk for a minute,

and he ran into the office, picked up the red telephone, and asked for McCoyen. He said, Anastis McCoyen, This is Mikhail Chumukov. I have a vaccine for a poliovirus, and Boris Petrovsky doesn't let me use it. What can I do? So Anastis McCoyen said, is it a good vaccine? And Mikhail Chumukov said, yes, it is a good vaccine. He said, use it. And then he hung up. Now is it. Ultimately, the Sabin oral polio vaccine was given to around 100 million people in the USSR. It was more efficient, it was easier to store, it was cheaper to make, then he just had to get approval in the United States by the public health system to use the vaccine in the United States.

And that happened in 1961 when the vaccine was licensed for production and use in the United States. Do you think Albert Saban gloated at all when it was his vaccine that was ultimately endorsed by the American Medical Association and overtook the Salt version? It's hard for me to picture him not gloating, but I think he was smart enough not to publicly gloat. He pretty much warned Salk about this, that it was coming. He had written to him and told him that other scientists were beginning to side with him and that he needed to expect this. Salk couldn't believe that it was going to happen to him, that his vaccine wouldn't be used anymore. And when it looked like the SABIN vaccine was going to get approved in 1961 and 1962, and each strain was approved separately, by the way.

And they took a long time doing it because they wanted to be super careful with it. By the time it was approved, the Salk vaccine was basically out and the SABN vaccine was in. and it was devastating to Jonah Salk to see that his vaccine was no longer going to be used. But for SABEN, this is a career-making achievement, and I suppose he could have just retired then, but he didn't. What did he do instead? Albert Sabin was different from many other scientists in that he didn't just develop the vaccine than let other people take it over.

He had to see it from beginning to end because he was such a, a perfectionist in his science, he needed to see that it was going to be made exactly as he prescribed. And he also wanted to be involved in the way it was administered to each of the populations where he gave it, because he gave it all for free. He didn't make any money on it. His experience in the Soviet Union taught him the science was what led to their collaboration and the politics didn't matter. So that is also a lesson he tried to convey to other people the rest of his life. Science is apolitical or should be.

And when we have something like a polio vaccine that can save children, we need to share up with others. So he did that the rest of his life. He just could never let it go. And he had his own health issues. He had some significant heart problems. And he would still go to Brazil. He went to India. He went wherever people invited him to go for the sake of the children, and he gave his time and his vaccines.

In 1988, in El Salvador, there had been years and years of fighting between several factions, and it was so dangerous for people that the children could not get vaccinated. Well, the Catholic Church, along with UNICEF from the World Health Organization, arranged for there to be a one-day ceasefire. just for the purpose of getting the children vaccinated, and both sides agreed to that. So on that day, they had a mass vaccination for all the children, and Albert Sabin came to lend his support, and people knew him because he was famous by that time. They recognized his pictures with his white hair and his beard, and by that time he was 82 years old, but he lent his support. And there was one story that even some of the soldiers helped give the vaccine.

And in return, you know, Sabin received many accolades in the U.S. He was awarded the U.S. Medal of Science by President Nixon and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan. But there was one award he cherished above all and didn't receive. What was that? And that was the Nobel Prize. Neither Salk nor Saven got the Nobel Prize. And there's a good reason for that. Neither of them in the development of their vaccines did anything that was unique.

from the vaccine world that could be considered priceless. So they built on the experience of others, as far as determining the strains of viral polio that they wanted to include in their vaccines, how they inactivated it or killed it. Those are all things that had been done before. What they did was just refine the process, pretty much. One of Sabin's fellows, whose name was Bob Chanick,

who he called his scientific son because he was very close to this fellow. He said, yeah, Albert used to sit by the phone every Monday in October waiting for the phone to ring to hear from the Nobel Committee that he was chosen to get the Nobel Prize for his vaccine. And it just never happened. So eventually he gave up. And actually, Salk said when he was asked about that, he said, yeah, he said, but most people believe I got it. So it's kind of the same thing. Albert Saban died in 1993 and is now buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

What would you like people to remember about him? What interested me about him was how he got to be so successful and why it was that he was so abrasive, yet be such a great humanitarian. He gave so much to the world, but he couldn't do it to those he was closest to. He was a salesman and he was able to convince people of his methodology, sometimes just because he's talked more loudly and more convincingly than other people, but also because his science was superior. He insisted that all of the people he worked with record their experiments in detail,

so they could see either where it went right or wrong and other people could duplicate it, and that if they didn't record it, it was not worth doing. Also, you know, just that he cared so much about the children of the world that he sacrificed a big part of his life, just traveling and not being comfortable in retirement. He got involved in many other causes like nuclear disarmament. He was against the Vietnam War and he protested with people. He also testified before Congress on a number of issues. So he never retired. And just the year before he died, he was still writing papers.

And even though he was hospitalized, he gave a lecture that he had agreed to do from a wheelchair with his IVs running and with his EKG monitor blipping away. But he still gave his lecture. He wasn't going to duck out of that responsibility because it was too important. He challenged everybody in that lecture hall to do what he did. And I think that made him stand apart and above others. Well, Karen Torgailey, thank you so much for talking with me today on America. American history tellers. Sure. It's been a pleasure.

That was my conversation with Karen Torgailey. She's an epidemiologist and author of the upcoming book, Albert Sabin, the life of a polio vaccine pioneer. Next on American history tellers, we go to Prohibition Era Chicago on St. Valentine's Day, 1929. After a hail of bullets, seven men lay dead in a gruesome act of gangland rivalry that stunned the nation. From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of our series on Conquering Polio. American History Tellers is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsay Granford Airship, sound design by Molly Bach, music by Throne. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker, managing producer Desi Blaylock.

Senior producers are Alita Rosansky and Andy Beckerman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery.