Albert Bruce Sabin was born in Bialystok, Poland. He immigrated with his family to the US in 1921. He graduated from New York University medical school. He trained in pathology, surgery and internal medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York and spent a year in research at the Lister Institute in London. In 1935 he returned to New York to join the Rockefeller Institute and then in 1939 moved to the University of Cincinnati and its Children's Hospital Research Foundation.