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Maurice Hilleman. Maurice Ralph Hilleman (August 30, 1919 – April 11, 2005) was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. [2][3][4][5][6] According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year. [3]
Aug 27, 2016 · Although largely unknown among the general public and even among public health practitioners and teachers, Maurice Hilleman was the outstanding scientist in the field of vaccinology in the 20 th century who brought dynamism and creativity to develop vaccines saving countless lives and bringing the means and the hope for eradication of important diseases such as measles, congenital rubella ...
- Theodore H. Tulchinsky, Theodore H. Tulchinsky
- 10.1016/B978-0-12-804571-8.00003-2
- 2018
- 2018
- Overview
- Heading off a pandemic
- All in the family
- Out of the spotlight
In 1957 a flu pandemic hit the U.S., but Maurice Hilleman was ready with a vaccine he mass produced in only months.
In April 1957, a mysterious illness was making its way through Hong Kong. Medical workers encountered throngs of children with “glassy-eyed stares,” and more than 10 percent of the city’s population was infected with influenza. The scientific community stayed quiet, but American virologist Maurice Hilleman recognized the threat: A pandemic was brewing.
Hilleman thought the disease was a new strain of influenza capable of spreading around the world. By the time the virus arrived in the U.S. in fall 1957, he was ready with a vaccine. His work prevented millions from contracting the deadly virus—and that’s a small fraction of the people Hilleman would save over the course of his career.
Born in August 1919, at the height of the Spanish flu, Hilleman was raised on a farm near Miles City, Montana. During the Depression, he managed to get a job as an assistant manager at a J.C. Penney store and planned to spend the rest of his professional career with the company—until his older brother convinced him to apply to college. He went to Montana State University on a full scholarship, graduated first in his class in 1941—and was accepted to every graduate school he applied to.
As a doctoral student in microbiology at the University of Chicago, Hilleman proved that chlamydia was actually a bacteria instead of a virus, a discovery that helped doctors treat the disease. Against his professor’s wishes, Hilleman went into the pharmaceutical industry instead of academia because he believed he’d be better positioned there to bring the benefits of his research to patients.
By the end of his career, he would develop more than 40 vaccines that prevented disease and death throughout the world. (Here's how vaccines keep diseases at bay.)
After four years with the E.R. Squibb pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, Hilleman transferred to the Walter Reed Army Medical Research Institute in Washington, D.C., to study respiratory illnesses and influenza outbreaks. There he proved that influenza viruses undergo mutations that allow them to bypass antibodies previously developed to the strain. This explained why one influenza vaccine didn’t protect a person for life, as a smallpox or polio vaccine could.
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Through this research, Hilleman became convinced that the virus in Hong Kong could be substantially different from existing strains, and thus could be deadly if it came to the United States or other nations. When he picked up a copy of The New York Times on April 17, 1957 and read about the situation in Hong Kong, he exclaimed, “My God. This is the pandemic. It’s here!” The next day he asked the military to collect virus samples there.
A month later, he received gargled saltwater from an ill Navy serviceman who had been to Hong Kong. Hilleman began incubating the virus and testing it against antibodies from hundreds of soldiers and civilians. He couldn’t find a single person with antibodies to this strain of influenza. (Meet the scientist who discovered the first coronavirus.)
In March 1963, Hilleman’s five-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, stumbled into his room in the middle of the night and complained about a sore throat and swollen jaw. She had contracted mumps.
Although rarely deadly, mumps can occasionally cause deafness and inflammation of the brain, pancreas, and testicles—sometimes leading to sterility in young men. In 1964, the U.S. had an estimated 210,000 mumps cases, according to the CDC.
Hilleman put his daughter to bed, then drove to his lab for materials to swab her throat. With her samples, he began growing the virus in solutions of dissolved, embryonic chickens to attenuate the disease, or make it less effective at infecting humans. By infecting batch after batch of chicken cells, the virus gradually became better at infecting chickens and worse at infecting humans. This way, Hilleman created a weakened virus that, when injected in humans, would be strong enough to create antibodies but not strong enough to give them the disease.
Jeryl Lynn’s younger sister Kirsten was one of the first to receive her father’s experimental vaccine in 1966. “Here was a baby being protected by a virus from her sister. This has been unique in the history of medicine, I think,” Hilleman later said in an interview with The Vaccine Makers project. Normally, younger children are infected by their older siblings, not given immunity.
Hilleman’s success was in part due to his position at Merck, the pharmaceutical company he worked at for 47 years. He was given direct control over his research there, and with Merck’s ample financial resources at their disposal, Hilleman and his team developed more than 40 vaccines for humans and animals. “There was money to spend to do what you needed to do [at Merck]. Money wasn’t an object. You could do your research,” Hilleman’s second wife Lorraine Witmer once told Hilleman’s biographer. By working in the private sector—the “dirty industry” as Hilleman joked—he was able to guide his research from the lab to the marketplace with his signature brashness.
The pharmaceutical industry had its drawbacks, though, and at times prevented Hilleman from gaining public recognition for his work. “I thought that if my name appeared on the paper, or if I was the one put in front of the television cameras or radio microphones, people would think that I was selling something,” Hilleman explained after his name was not included on the paper proving his hepatitis B vaccine was effective. In the end, Hilleman didn’t name a single discovery after himself.
Hilleman and his team developed eight of the 14 vaccines currently recommended for children: measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and Haemophilus influenzae (Hib vaccine). The WHO estimates that the measles vaccine alone prevented 20.3 million deaths worldwide between 2000 and 2015.
In 1998, researcher A.J. Wakefield published an article claiming that Hilleman’s mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. This study sparked an anti-vaccination movement, even though the paper was disproven by several independent studies and formally retracted by the journal in 2010—five years after Hilleman had died from cancer at age 85.
Fall/19. Maurice Hilleman, PhD’44, was born in 1919 near Miles City, Montana, during the deadliest influenza pandemic in history. When the next global influenza pandemic arrived, Hilleman was in the position to save thousands of lives, thanks in part to his Montana roots. Before Hilleman, who died in April 2005, became the world’s most ...
Aug 25, 2022 · The Asian influenza was resistant to antibiotics, and approximately one in 300 to one in 10,000 people died from the virus depending on the country and precautions taken. In total, the number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 1.1 million. Maurice R. Hilleman (1919-2005), circa 1958. (B014616) (Image courtesy of the National Library of ...
Mar 25, 2021 · Most of Hilleman’s long career was spent at the pharmaceutical company Merck, where he began working as the director of virus and cell biology research in 1957. Here, he led the development of more than three dozen vaccines, including eight of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended to prevent childhood illnesses that were once common throughout the world.
May 6, 2013 · The name Maurice Hilleman may not ring a bell. But today 95 percent of American children receive the M.M.R. — the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella that Dr. Hilleman invented, starting with ...
