Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From Wondery, I'm Lindsey 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.
Chapter 2: What was the impact of polio on American families in the 1950s?
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.
Chapter 3: Who were Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the race for a polio vaccine?
Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. And if you ask people today who developed the polio vaccine, most will say Jonas Salk. But 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.
Chapter 4: What personal experiences shaped Karen Torgaly's perspective on polio?
Karen Torgaly 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. Karen Torgaly, 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, 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. So 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. And when you had mentioned Albert Sabin to them, what was the reaction? What did people think about him?
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Chapter 5: How did Albert Sabin's upbringing influence his career in virology?
It was very obvious if they knew him. I asked about a number of other scientists too, Jonas Halk and Hilary Koprowski 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.
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, 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?
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 the Jewish people, and especially in their little town of Bielostok. 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.
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 had hit his eye, he probably would have been blinded. So that was a very traumatic experience for him.
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Chapter 6: What led to the development of the oral polio vaccine?
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 school 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 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 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 what kind of bacteria pneumonia patients had that was making them sick. So there were different strains of pneumococcus pneumonia 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 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 on their abdomens for two or three hours.
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Chapter 7: How did the relationship between Salk and Sabin evolve during vaccine research?
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 needed 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 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. 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.
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Chapter 8: What challenges did Sabin face in getting his vaccine approved in the USSR?
It was super hot and miserable, but that's where he wanted to be and chose to be.
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After 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. 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 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. and Sabin became a mentor to Salk, and they got along pretty well by all reports.
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.
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