Today, I am thankful for the one person who has saved more lives in the last century anyone else.
Today is the birthday of a scientist who will likely receive little fanfare. Yet, the world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the venerable Dr. Maurice Hillman. As the American political activist Ralph Nader so elegantly describes Hilleman’s situation: “Almost no one knew about him, saw him on television, or read about him in newspapers or magazines. His anonymity, in comparison with Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jose Canseco, or an assortment of B-grade actors, tells something about our society’s and media’s concepts of celebrity—much less of the heroic.” To my dismay, Hilleman never received a Nobel Prize for any of the eight vaccines that we now routinely administer to the American youth. He was never publicly lauded for his role in delineating the etiology for a variety of microbial infections—chlamydia, adenovirus, and several of the viruses that cause hepatitis. The lessons he taught us about genetic “drifts” and “shifts” in certain viruses, especially influenza, were instrumental in defining a path to medically address such infections today. Yet, he was never publicly idolized for this insight or the countless number of lives he saved from the 1957 influenza pandemic. As Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, so eloquently puts it: Hilleman’s contribution was “the best kept secret among the lay public. If you look at the whole field of vaccinology, nobody was more influential.”
I shudder to think what might have transpired if Hilleman had not grown into the preeminent leader he is certainly recognized to have become.Sadly, neither Hilleman’s mother nor his twin sister survived his birth on this day (Aug 30) in 1919. Born into poverty amidst the Great Depression in a smallfarming town in Montana, Hilleman and his seven older siblings were raised on a nearby farm by their caring uncle and aunt.Separated from his parents, Hilleman nearly died a second time at the age of 8, when he contracted a severe case of diphtheria. But not only did he survive that additional insult, he thrived. His fair share ofchildhood hardships and his troubling station in life never deterredhim in his pursuit of a better existence. He spent his spare time as a teenager attentively reading on topics such as chemistry, microbiology, and zoology. After graduating from the local public high school in Custer County in 1937, the 18-year old Hilleman desperately wanted to attend college, but his lack of any financial backing for a postgraduate education led him to accept a job at the local JC Penney’s department store. After a year of working in retail, Hilleman was thrilled to discover from one of his older siblings that Montana State University, in thetown of Bozeman, was offering full merit scholarships for prospective Montanans. Hilleman applied and received a full 4-year scholarship to the University, where he dutifully double majored in microbiology and chemistry. Four years later, after graduating as the valedictorian of his college class, he enrolled in a doctoral graduate program inmicrobiology at the University of Chicago, where he took an interestin Chlamydia. . He unearthed that chlamydia was caused by a gram-negative bacterium. He completed a five-year PhD program in bacteriology and parasitology in just three years.
After his postgraduate education ended in 1944, Hilleman took a job at ER Squibb (later to become Bristol-Myers Squibb), where he developed a vaccine to protect against Japanese B encephalitis— an infection caused by a zoonotic virus and that was extremely problematic for the US troops stationed in the Asia Pacific. While there, he also oversaw Squibb’s vaccine programs for rabies and small pox. In 1948, he took a job at Walter Reed Institute of Research, where he spent the next decade studying the effect of respiratory viruses. While at Walter Reed, Hilleman helped develop the first vaccine against two key serotypes that caused adenovirus infection. He also took a strong interest in the virus that causes influenza. During his early career, Dr. Hilleman observed that the influenza virus routinely changes over time. Sometimes the changes are small (drifts), but other times they can be dramatic (shifts). Antigenic shift can result in influenza pandemics because, when they occur, very few individuals in the world are immune to the significantly-changed virus. One day in April 1957, while sitting in his office, Hilleman read a New York Times report of an aggressive influenza outbreak in Hong Kong, wherein ten percent of the population (250,000) had developed significant influenza disease. He suspected a pandemic on par with what was regrettably observed in 1918 might be brewing. So, the next day, he cabled the army’s laboratory staff at the US base in Zama, Japan, and he ordered them to collect swabs of throat washings fromany service member that was suffering from suspected influenza. Once he collected the samples, he analyzed them relative to banked samples in his laboratory. He discovered what we feared most. Only a handful of the banked samples displayed antibody against the virus (which turned out to be H2N2), and all of those were from individuals in their 70s and 80s who had survived the 1889-90 influenza pandemic. So, under Hilleman’s direction, several pharmaceutical companies developed a vaccine that specifically targeted the 1957 strain. Together, Hilleman and others created a vaccine before the virus could arrive later that year in the U.S. Although 70,000 deaths in the U.S. occurred as a result of the 1957 pandemic, public health officials estimate that the number of American deaths could have reached one million had Dr. Hilleman’s vaccine not been available.
In 1957, Hilleman joined Merck. He went on to develop the first measles vaccine by developing an attenuated version of the virus. The measles vaccine was subsequently released in 1963. Later, when his 5-year old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, developed mumps, he harvested the virus from her throat and drove it to Merck West Point facility in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night to ultimately develop the mumps vaccine. He went on to develop a vaccine for German measles (rubella) as well; when combined with the earlier two vaccines, the trivalent vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella was born and was officially launched in 1971. We use essentially the same vaccine today, with some minor modifications, to vaccinate our children in the US and other parts of the world. But, the legacy of Hilleman did not end there.
Hilleman would contribute to the development of vaccines for Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, S. pneumoniae, H. influenzae, N. meningitidis, and chicken pox (Varicella). Hilleman retired from Merck in 1984 at the age of 65 years, as this was the mandatory retirement age at that time for all Merck employees. During his illustrious 27-year career, Hilleman would develop 8 of the 14 vaccines given to young infants and children in the developed world. In the Animal Health area, he played a crucial role in developing a vaccine against Marek Disease—aconcerning cause of cancer in chickens. Most importantly, the vaccines he helped pioneer have saved countless lives. It’s hard toestimate exactly how many lives are saved each year as a direct result of Hilleman’s work, but one thing is for sure—the numbers are in the millions.
Hilleman’s anonymity does not diminish his achievements. So, on this day, take a second to share your gratitude for the birth of Dr. Maurice Ralph Hilleman, one of the world’s mastermind scientists and the most influential vaccinologist to ever walk on this Earth.
댓글