ALBERT Bruce Sabin, developer of oral polio vaccine, has died of heart failure in Washington. He was 86.

A prominent figure since the 1930s in research on virus and viral disease, Sabin developed a sweet, cherryred vaccine after 20 years of research. It came into wide use in the first half of the 1960s and has given lifelong immunity from polio to millions.

Sabin was born in Pbland and graduated in 1928 from New York University. He was awarded the MD degree in 1931 - the year that a polio epidemic broke out in New York and became the subject of Sabin's research.