I have always been curious about how a few leaders and entrepreneurs became game changers. People whose actions changed the world for the rest of us. This year I thought I would write about several dozen of my favorites.
I will start with a man who has been called “the greatest scientist of the 20th century” and I bet you never heard of him – Maurice Hilleman. Hilleman created eight of the fourteen vaccines you and I see on our vaccine schedule today – measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.
Hilleman, who lived from 1919 to 2005, is the scientist who created the framework for how the world develops vaccines. He was born in Montana, grew-up on a farm, and has said that living on a farm is where his interest in science emerged. His childhood was tough, his mother and twin sister died at childbirth, and it was his brilliance and curiosity that carried him through.
Dr. Maurice R Hilleman, Merck (AP Photo)
While earning his PhD in microbiology in 1944 from the University of Chicago, his brilliance emerged when he showed the scientific world that the cause of chlamydia infections was not a virus but rather a bacterium growing inside of cells.
Flu Shots. Have you ever wondered why we need to get a new flu shot every year? You can thank Maurice Hilleman, who figured-out how the flu virus mutates while he was serving in as chief of the Department of Respiratory Diseases at what is now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research from 1948 to 1957.
He was the first scientist to understand how viruses shift when they jump back and forth between humans and animals like birds or bats. In 1957 he was the first person ever to avert a pandemic because he saw one coming from Hong Kong. He tweaked the flu vaccine, people got inoculated, and he was able to save an estimated million lives in America.
Jeryl Lynn, Kirsten, Hilleman (Smithsonian Photo)
Mumps Vaccine. I found the story of how Hilleman developed the modern mumps vaccine intriguing. In 1963, his daughter, Jeryl Lynn, came down with the mumps. He used material from her to create a mumps vaccine, still used today and named after her. It is the one you see in the trivalent (measles, mumps and rubella) MMR vaccine that he also developed. (Picture L to R – Jeryl Lynn, baby sister Kirsten, Dr. Hilleman)
If you are intrigued by Dr. Hilleman’s story and/or would like your children to learn more about a science hero and game changer, here is a wonderful 16-minute video produced by the Vaccine Makers Project. In the video called Maurice Hilleman, The Man Behind the Science, you will meet his children, too.
One of the film’s narrators is Dr. Fauci, who said this about Hilleman’s contributions, “He was the best kept secret among the lay public. If you look at the whole field of vaccinology, nobody was more influential…Hilleman is one of the true giants of science, medicine and public health in the 20th century. One can say without hyperbole that Maurice has changed the world.”
