THE MAN WHOSE WORK STILL SAVE LIVES

Table of Contents

MAURICE HILLEMAN

Hilleman developed eight of the fourteen vaccines routinely recommended for children in the United States, including those for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, and pneumonia. Before his vaccines, these were not minor inconveniences, they were killers and cripplers, especially of the young.

The World Health Organization estimates that vaccines save 2 to 3 million lives every year. Hilleman's vaccines account for a substantial portion of that number. By some estimates, his work alone has saves over 8 million lives annually. He also played a crucial role in the early response to influenza pandemics, developing a vaccine against the 1957 Asian flu with extraordinary speed, likely preventing a catastrophe.

His hepatitis B vaccine was itself a landmark, it was the first vaccine against a human cancer (hepatitis B is a leading cause of liver cancer), and the first to be made from human plasma. He later helped develop a recombinant DNA version, pioneering an entirely new approach to vaccine technology.

Hilleman was famously gruff, unglamorous, and uninterested in being a celebrity. He gave credit to his teams, avoided the spotlight, and just worked. He also operated within a pharmaceutical company rather than academia, which kept him somewhat outside the circles where scientific fame tends to accumulate. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, became a cultural icon. Hilleman, who developed nine times as many vaccines, remained largely unknown to the public.

He died in 2005, but the world he helped create is one where parents no longer dread routine childhood illness the way previous generations did, where measles outbreaks are newsworthy precisely because they are rare, where rubella no longer cause mass birth defects, where hepatitis B is a preventable disease. That transformation is, in no small part his hand work. Few individuals in the 20th century has saved more lives, he is one of the great unsung heroes of modern medicine.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.