NNLM Reading Club: Public Health

Book

Meredith Wadman discusses the epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases. Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chickenpox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles, and adenovirus.

The Vaccine Race | Meredith Wadman | Penguin Books | 2018 reprint | 464 pages | ISBN: 978-0143111313

Author

Meredith Wadman, MD, has covered biomedical research politics from Washington, DC, for twenty years and written for Nature, Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, currently, Science. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia and completed medical school as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford.

Official Website of Meredith Wadman

Interview

What the Race to Develop the Rubella Vaccine Teaches Us About Fighting Disease Today with Joshua Johnson. NPR: 1A. February 28, 2017