After performing eleven transfusions on himself, he declared that his balding had stopped and his eyesight had improved. Unfortunately, Boganov had not screened the blood he was using for infectious diseases, leading him to transfuse himself with blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis, which killed him.
When you think of world-saving heroes, obvious answers come to mind: Superman, Captain America, Randy Quaid’s character from Independence Day, the usual. But there are real life people who have saved thousands, millions, and arguably a billion lives in the real world, within living memory, and you probably never heard their names.
Maurice Hilleman
As someone who did not die as a child from a preventable disease, it is the author’s considered opinion that vaccines are the bee’s knees. Most of the vaccines that have kept us alive for the past two generations were created by one man, who did not even want credit for it. Eradicating childhood diseases through vaccination was the life work of virologist Maurice Hilleman. By the time of his death in 2005 at age eighty-five, he had developed vaccines for measles-mumps-rubella, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and dozens more.
The fragility of life was with Maurice Hilleman from the day he was born in 1919, when both his twin sister and mother died. This was the same year the Spanish flu killed around 5 percent of the world’s population. After high school, Hilleman earned a full scholarship to Montana State University. Majoring in chemistry and microbiology, he graduated first in his class, going on to graduate school to earn his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Chicago in 1944.
When Hilleman started his first job at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons in 1944, American soldiers deployed in Japan had been contracting Japanese encephalitis-B from infected mosquitoes. As chief of what is today the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Hilleman studied pandemics. He was able to recognize patterns in the type and severity of pandemics and could predict with stunning accuracy when they would hit. When Hilleman and a colleague saw signs of an impending flu pandemic spreading through Hong Kong in 1957, they raced against the clock to produce and distribute forty million vaccines. About 69,000 Americans died from that flu, but the toll would have been far worse without the vaccine.
American Samoa was one of the only places not to see a single Spanish flu death, because the governor took the reports he was hearing seriously and blocked all incoming ships from making port.
Can we all go to American Samoa now?
Hilleman moved to the Merck pharmaceutical company and continued his laser-focused attention on the prevention of other diseases. Some hit close to home. When his daughter Jeryl Lynn came down with the mumps in 1967, he swabbed her throat and collected the virus specimens to take back to his lab. His other daughter, one-year-old Kirsten, was among the first to take the experimental vaccine. “There was a baby being protected by a virus from her sister, and this has been unique in the history of medicine, I think,” Hilleman remembered in an interview. The strain that Hilleman collected from his daughter reduced the incidence of mumps from 186,000 cases a year to fewer than 1,000 cases. For perspective, that’s equivalent of reducing the capacity of Rose Bowl Stadium twice-over to half the capacity of a suburban high school.
In the early 1960s, measles killed more than five hundred American children annually. Hilleman and pediatrician Joseph Stokes found that they could minimize the side effects of the measles vaccine by giving a gamma globulin shot in one arm and the vaccine in the other, which helped to quell parental concerns and improve the rate of immunization. Hilleman continued to refine the vaccine, eventually producing the much safer strain that is still in use today. Rather than put his name on it, Hilleman named it “Moraten,” short for “more attenuated enders.” “Attenuated” means weakened, and much of the work had been done in John F. Enders’ laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital.
In the spring of 1963, a rubella epidemic began in Europe and quickly swept around the globe. In the US alone, around 11,000 newborns died and 20,000 suffered birth defects, including deafness, heart disease, and cataracts. Hilleman was already testing a vaccine he had developed, but agreed to work with a vaccine from federal regulators, which he later described as “toxic, toxic, toxic.” By 1969, he had cleaned it up enough to obtain FDA approval and prevent another rubella epidemic. In 1971, he combines the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines to make the MMR vaccine, replacing a series of six shots with two.
In 1978, having found a better rubella vaccine than his own, Hilleman asked its developer if he could use it in the MMR. The developer, Dr. Stanley Plotkin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was speechless. It was an expensive choice for Hilleman’s employer and might have been a painful one for anyone other than Dr. Hilleman. According to Plotkin, “It’s not that he didn’t have an ego. He certainly did, but he valued excellence above that. Once he decided that this strain was better, he did what he had to do,” even if it meant sacrificing his work.
It’s impossible to know how many lives Maurice Hilleman’s work has saved. By one estimate, it is eight million per year. Though he was forced to retire at age sixty-five, he continued to work for the greater good, serving as an adviser to the World Health Organization. He never won a Nobel Prize, but Hilleman did receive the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Youyou Tu
When it comes to deadly animals, sharks, cobras, and anything native to Australia, all pale in comparison to the mosquito, courtesy of its tiny passenger, malaria. For example, in 2008, plasmodia, the parasite that causes malaria, infected 247 million people and caused almost one million deaths. Symptoms include fever, headache, and vomiting. Malaria can quickly become life-threatening by disrupting the blood supply to vital organs. The disease strikes children hard, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks in part to traveling humans, malaria affects more than a hundred countries, from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, to parts of Europe.
The single greatest arrow in our quiver in the fight against malaria was discovered by a doctor looking not only to the future, but also to the wisdom of the past. The drug, called artemisinin, was found in the 1970s by Chinese scientist Youyou Tu and her team, who discovered ancient references to a fever-easing plant in traditional Chinese medical texts. Because of their work, malaria death rates have decreased 47 percent worldwide; the rate of infection in children has dropped 46 percent.
Tu was born in Zhejiang, China in 1930. A tuberculosis infection interrupted her high school education but inspired her to go into medical research. Tu graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy in 1955 and attended the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences to continue her research on Chinese herbal medicine.
While teaching and researching in 1969, Tu was suddenly appointed head of a group of chemists and pharmacologists for a top-secret military program. Project 523 was established by Chairman Mao with the goal of finding ways to prevent and cure malaria. For two years, the project had focused on developing Western-style antimalarial drugs, but synthetic compounds bore no fruit, so Project 523 turned to traditional herbal medicine for answers. This was a surprising turn of events, considering one of Mao’s objectives with the Cultural Revolution was to promote communist ideology by purging China of traditional literature and art. Because of this, scholars were considered the lowest caste of society, and scientific research was only sanctioned if the Communist Party decided the purpose was sufficiently practical. Tu was told she had been chosen because of her unique combination of skills—she had a degree in Western pharmacology, yet she could differentiate thousands of traditional herbs.
