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—WORK TITLE: The Vaccine Race
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1961
WEBSITE:
CITY: Arlington
STATE: VA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1961, in Canada; married Tim Wells; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, B.A., 1982; attended University of British Columbia medical school; University of Oxford, medical degree, 1988; Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, M.S., 1992. Medical studies in Ghana, Malaysia, and South Africa.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wall Street Journal, news intern in Pittsburgh, PA, 1992; Oakland Tribune/Alameda Newspaper Group, Washington, DC, bureau chief, 1992-95; Nature, biomedical policy reporter, 1995-2013; Science, staff writer, 2016—.
AVOCATIONS:Reading, backpacking.
AWARDS:Rhodes Scholarship, 1985; Eric and Wendy Schmidt Editorial Fellowship, New America, 2013-16.
WRITINGS
Contributor to newspapers and magazines, including New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Fortune.
SIDELIGHTS
Meredith Wadman, a veteran science writer, explores the development of vaccines in The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. While providing a general overview of the subject, she focuses primarily on the effort in the 1960s and 1970s to create a vaccine for rubella, also known as German measles. There was an outbreak of the disease every few years; it was not particularly serious for most who contracted it, but there was a major exception. Women who had rubella during pregnancy often delivered babies with heart defects, cognitive impairments, or other significant problems. This led scientists to accelerate their research on a rubella vaccine.
A scientist at the center of Wadman’s story is Leonard Hayflick, who worked at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. At the time, researchers were seeking “clean” cells to use in making vaccines. Polio vaccines, developed in the 1950s, had relied largely on monkey cells, but these were sometimes tainted with viruses, one of which caused cancer in laboratory animals. Hayflick looked to human fetuses as a source of clean cells, and when he heard cells were available from a legally aborted fetus in Sweden, he acquired a supply. These cells were capable of reproducing almost infinitely. He created about 800 vials of them. He called the cell line WI-38, for the Wistar Institute. In 1968, when he left for a job with Stanford University, he took the remaining 375 vials with him, but they were actually the property of the U.S. government, as Hayflick had signed a contract with the National Institutes of Health. The government called him a thief and sought to reclaim the cells; Hayflick left Stanford, which he felt had not stood behind him, and became disgraced and unemployable. He ended up signing a million-dollar agreement with the Merck pharmaceutical company, however, to provide it with cells to use in developing its rubella vaccine. Cells derived from WI-38, Wadman writes, have continued to be used to make a variety of vaccines — for polio, rabies, hepatitis, and more — into the twenty-first century.
In addition to Hayflick’s work, Wadman highlights the efforts of numerous other researchers, including Stanley Plotkin, Hilary Koprowski, Ruth Kirschstein, and Dorothy Horstmann. She also delves into many of the ethical questions involved in vaccine development. The woman whose aborted fetus was used to create the WI-38 line was never asked for permission and never received compensation, Wadman notes. She sought an interview with the woman, who preferred not to speak about the matter, and whose identity remains confidential. The author also details how researchers once engaged in practices that would come to be considered unethical; these included testing vaccines on children and adults in orphanages, prisons, and mental hospitals, often without the subjects’ consent.
Several reviewers thought Wadman had produced a valuable work that made a complicated topic accessible. “While there is some highly technical science at the heart of this tale, the casual reader shouldn’t be dissuaded by the digressions about the intricacies of cellular biology or the fifty pages of footnotes,” related André Picard in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. “Wadman does a superb job of making the technical comprehensible to the lay reader.” She also provides compelling portraits of key scientists, he said, explaining: “While the science is fascinating, the foibles of the main characters are what keep the reader gripped.” London Guardian contributor Robin McKie commended her for underlining the importance of Hayflick’s work. “It is an extraordinary story and Wadman is to be congratulated, not just for uncovering it but for relaying it in such a pacy, stimulating manner,” McKie reported. “This is a first-class piece of science writing that does considerable justice to Hayflick, a character who achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble.” In Science‘s online edition, Erica C. Jonlin noted: “Capturing the human side of vaccine development, and explaining the science with clarity and precision, Wadman has written an intelligent and entertaining tome that will be of interest to scientists, regulators, and lay readers alike.”
In the Boston Globe, Helen Branswell offered a mixed assessment. “Wadman’s research is extensive, and her book is packed with anecdotes and details of the science, the times, and the people,” Branswell observed. “But many readers may find descriptions of Hayflick’s work overly detailed or wonder whether the backstories of incidental characters add much.” Overall, though, The Vaccine Race is valuable because it “recalls a breakthrough that has faded in our collective memory, owing to its success in all but eliminating a major cause of birth defects across a wide swath of the world,” Branswell concluded. Some other reviewers praised the book unreservedly. A Kirkus Reviews commentator called it “an important story well told, featuring the drama and characters needed to make this a candidate for film adaptation.” A Publishers Weekly critic summed it up as “an exemplary piece of medical journalism,” in which “Wadman makes strikingly clear the human costs of medical developments.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2017, June Sawyers, review of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, p. 7.
Boston Globe, February 3, 2017, Helen Branswell, review of The Vaccine Race.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 10, 2017, André Picard, review of The Vaccine Race.
Guardian (London, England), February 27, 2017, Robin McKie, review of The Vaccine Race.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2016, review of The Vaccine Race.
Library, Journal, January 1, 2017, Cynthia Lee Knight, review of The Vaccine Race, p. 124.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of The Vaccine Race, p. 139.
Scotsman, March 1, 2017, Rob Ewing, review of The Vaccine Race.
ONLINE
BrightSight Group Web site, http://brightsightgroup.com/ (March 30, 2017), brief biography.
Meredith Wadman Home Page, http://meredithwadman.com (March 30, 2017).
Science Web logs, http://blogs.sciencemag.org/ (January 31, 2017), Erica C. Jonlin, review of The Vaccine Race.
Science Web site, http://www.sciencemag.org/ (March 30, 2017), brief biography.*
Meredith Wadman
Author of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, and a reporter for Science Magazine
Speech Topics
Bringing Sanity and Evidence to the Vaccine Debate
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Biography
MEREDITH WADMAN
SCIENCE MAGAZINE ARTICLES
MEREDITH'S PRESS KIT
Meredith Wadman is a neuroscience reporter at Science magazine in Washington, D.C. Her gripping book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, tells the tale of WI-38, a fascinating cell line with a colorful and controversial history and a huge public health impact.
Before joining Science, Wadman was an editorial fellow at New America, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Prior to that, she was a Washington-based reporter covering the medical research community for Nature for 17 years. She has also written on biotech and on biomedical policy issues for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune magazine. Wadman earned a B.A. in human biology at Stanford University and began medical school at the University of British Columbia, in her native Vancouver, Canada. She completed her medical degree at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also earned a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City.
Directly after graduating from Stanford, she worked on fishing boats in southeast Alaska to finance an 8-month backpacking journey that took her from Morocco to Malaysia via north Africa, Israel, India and Nepal. Later, as a medical student, she staffed public health clinics in rural Ghana, worked on the pediatric ward in an overwhelmed, underfunded hospital for blacks in Apartheid-era South Africa and traveled in longboats to work in public health clinics in the jungles of Borneo.
Today, Wadman lives in suburban Washington with her husband, Tim Wells; two teenage sons; and Max and Grace, a German Shepherd and a Husky mix. She loves walking the dogs, talking with friends and reading histories and biographies. She spends a lot of time in arenas watching her sons play ice hockey, but still confuses the point and the slot.
Meredith Wadman
Meredith joined Science as a staff writer focusing on neuroscience in September 2016, after covering biomedical research and its politics from Washington, D.C., for 20 years. She has been a staff writer for Nature and a contributing writer at Fortune. She has also written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her first book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, will be published by Viking Penguin in February 2017. Meredith earned her B.A. in Human Biology at Stanford University and began medical school at the University of British Columbia in her native Vancouver. She completed her medical degree as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and earned a master’s of science at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
ABOUT MEREDITH
Meredith Wadman Author of The Vaccine Race
Photo by Johnny Shryock for New America
Meredith Wadman is a neuroscience reporter at Science magazine in Washington, D.C. Her gripping book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, tells the tale of WI-38, a fascinating cell line with a colorful and controversial history and a huge public health impact.
Before joining Science, Wadman was an editorial fellow at New America, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Prior to that, she was a Washington-based reporter covering the medical research community for Nature for 17 years. She has also written on biotech and on biomedical policy issues for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune magazine. Wadman earned a B.A. in human biology at Stanford University and began medical school at the University of British Columbia, in her native Vancouver, Canada. She completed her medical degree at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also earned a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City.
Directly after graduating from Stanford, she worked on fishing boats in southeast Alaska to finance an 8-month backpacking journey that took her from Morocco to Malaysia via north Africa, Israel, India and Nepal. Later, as a medical student, she staffed public health clinics in rural Ghana, worked on the pediatric ward in an overwhelmed, underfunded hospital for blacks in Apartheid-era South Africa and traveled in longboats to work in public health clinics in the jungles of Borneo.
Today, Wadman lives in suburban Washington with her husband, Tim Wells; two teenage sons; and Max and Grace, a German Shepherd and a Husky mix. She loves walking the dogs, talking with friends and reading histories and biographies. She spends a lot of time in arenas watching her sons play ice hockey, but still confuses the point and the slot.
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MEREDITH WADMAN, BM,BCh,M.S.@meredithwadmanwww.meredithwadman.comEMPLOYMENT9/2016-present Neuroscience Reporter, Sciencemagazine, Washington, D.C.Cover the science and policy of brain research, including its impacts on diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism.9/2013-8/2016Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowand Editorial Fellow,New America,Washington, D.C. WroteThe Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. (Viking: February 7, 2017.)This book tells thegrippingtaleof the human fetal cell lineWI-38. Thesecells from a fetus aborted in Sweden in 1962 havebeen used to makevaccines protecting hundreds of millions of people from rubella, rabies, measlesand otherinfectious diseases.8/95 –8/2016Freelance Writer, Washington, D.C.Wrote opinion articles on medical policy forpublications including The New York Times, The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journaland Time’s on-line opinion page, TIME Ideas.As a contributing writer at Fortune,Iwrote featureson gene therapy and Craig Venter’s quest to build life in the lab. My Fortune feature on heart attacks in women won Time Warner’s annual publicservice journalism award.My op-ed topics have included vaccine resistance and embryo research.12/95 –8/2013Biomedical Policy Reporter, Nature, Washington, D.C.Covered the politics of biomedical research for Nature. Wrote breaking news, features and editorials on issues including human embryonic stem cell research and animal experimentation. Covered Congress, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. Also covered research universities and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Wrote for sister journals including Nature Medicine and Nature Biotechnology.12/92-7/1995Washington Bureau Chief, The Oakland Tribune/Alameda Newspaper Group.Established Washington, D.C. bureau of major metropolitan daily and chain of four suburban San Francisco daily newspapers with a combined circulation of 190,000. Covered the White House,Congress and federal agencies.Wrote hard news, features, political analysis and profiles.5-8/1992News Intern,The Wall Street Journal,Pittsburgh, Pa.Reported andwrote breaking news and feature stories,including exposés on women in medicineand women returning to the workforce after having children.EDUCATION9/91 -5/92Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, N.Y.Master of Science in Journalism, 1992.9/85 -7/88University of Oxford Medical School, Oxford, U.K.BM,BCh (equivalent of North American M.D.), 1988.9/83-8/85University of British Columbia Medical School, Vancouver, Canada.Completed pre-clinical medical studies beforetransferring to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.9/78 -6/82Stanford University, Stanford, CA.B.A. with distinction, Human Biology, 1982. Minor in French.Phi Beta Kappa.ACADEMIC DISTINCTIONS1985RhodesScholarshipADDITIONAL INFORMATIONMedical studies in Ghana, Malaysia and South Africa.
PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS(A SAMPLING)Wadman, Meredith. “The Cure for Cancer that Parents Won’t Use.” The Washington PostFriday August 22, 2014, p. A 17.http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/Meredith.-wadman-hpv-vaccinations-will-guard-against-a-rising-cancer-threat/2014/08/21/846d5766-27de-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.htmlWadman, Meredith. “Medical research: Cell division.” Nature498, 422-426 (27 June 2013)http://www.nature.com/news/medical-research-cell-division-1.13273Wadman, Meredith. “Firearms research: The gun fighter.” Nature496, 412-415 (25 April 2013) http://www.nature.com/news/firearms-research-the-gun-fighter-1.12864Wadman, Meredith. “Autism’s fight for facts: A voice for science.” Nature479,28-31 (3 November 2011) http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111102/full/479028a.htmlWadman, Meredith. “Animal rights: Chimpanzee research on trial.” Nature474,268-271 (15 June 2011) http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110615/full/474268a.htmlWadman, Meredith. “Life after death: In February, a biologist gunned down three colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Meredith Wadman reports how their department is trying to move past the tragedy.” Nature465, 150-155 (12 May 2010) http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100512/full/465150a.htmlWadman, Meredith. “Closing arguments: The battle to keep a lab funded can be long and painful.” Nature457,650-655 (5 February 2009) http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090204/full/457650a.htmlWadman, Meredith. “Biology’s bad boy is back: Craig Venter brought us the human genome. Now he aims to build a life form thatwill change the world.” Fortune 8 March 2004: 167-76.http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/03/08/363705/index.htmWadman, Meredith. “So you want a girl? A new technology lets parents order up the sex of their child. It’s poised to become big business –and a big ethical dilemma.” Fortune 19 February 2001: 174-182.http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/02/19/296875/index.htmWadman, Meredith. “Can gene therapy cure this child?” Fortune 1 May 2000: 179-96.http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/05/01/278933/index.htmWadman, Meredith. “A heart attack of her own.” Fortune 22 November 1999: 224-34.http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/22/269129/index.htmWadman, Meredith. “Cloning without human clones.” The Wall Street Journal 20 January 1998: A18.Wadman, Meredith. “The DNA hard sell.” The New York Times 16 December 1996: A15.Wadman, Meredith. “Women need not apply: The DNA test that doctors don’t want to share.” Washington Post 5 May 1996: C3.Wadman, Meredith. “Embryo research is pro-life.” The New York Times 21 February 1996: A19.
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the
Human Costs of Defeating Disease
June Sawyers
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p7.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease.
By Meredith Wadman.
Feb. 2017. 448p. Viking, $30 (9780525427537). 614.5.
We tend to take vaccines and their benefits for granted until a new scare erupts, such as the Zika virus. Biomedical
reporter Wadman explores in great detail the oftencontroversial background stories of various major breakthroughs in
cell biology that led to the creation of some of the world's most important vaccines, such as those for rubella (German
measles), polio, rabies, chicken pox, hepatitis A, and shingles. Wadman reveals the unsung heroes behind the research,
including young scientist Leonard Hayflick, who, working at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, launched WI38
cells, "the first normal, noncancerous cells in virtually unlimited quantities," that are still in use today. But, as Wadman
chronicles, these cells also became part of a feud between the science community and the government. Wadman also
covers medical experiments that readers will now find "abhorrent," including healthy prisoners being injected with
hepatitistainted blood serum and premature African American babies being injected with experimental polio vaccine.
In all, an important book on a persistently controversial aspect of health care. June Sawyers
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sawyers, June. "The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease." Booklist, 1 Feb.
2017, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244697&it=r&asid=9c47115c868da63bd4bab986511a7c27.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
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Wadman, Meredith. The Vaccine Race: Science,
Politics, and the Human Cost of Defeating
Disease
Cynthia Lee Knight
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p124.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Wadman, Meredith. The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Cost of Defeating Disease. Viking. Feb.
2017.448p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780525427537. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780698177789. SCI
Today, many take for granted that the vaccines administered to prevent measles, mumps, and other diseases are safe and
effective. How they got that way is at the center of this compelling account of the development of the first polio,
rubella, and rabies vaccines. Wadman, a biomedical reporter who has contributed to Science, Nature, and other
publications, concentrates her work on a group of vaccine researchers at the Wistar Institute of Philadelphia in the
1960s and 1970s. Each of these driven, ambitious men hoped to be the first to create a new or better vaccine. Another
crucial part of the narrative concerns the development of WI38a controversial human fetal cell line still used today to
isolate and grow viruses. The author also examines the disturbing practice of testing experimental vaccines on orphans,
prisoners, and others before informed consent was mandatory. The basic facts and events of this period in vaccinology
history are enlivened by the vivid recollections of key individuals interviewed at length by the author. VERDICT
Highly recommended for readers who enjoy medical breakthrough stories such as Thomas Hager's The Demon Under
the Microscope and studies of medical research ethics, including Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Knight, Cynthia Lee. "Wadman, Meredith. The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Cost of Defeating
Disease." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 124. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562451&it=r&asid=b795e695d25adfff97034d3c7cef00df.
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Quoted in Sidelights: An important story well told, featuring the drama and characters needed to make this a candidate for film adaptation.
Wadman, Meredith: THE VACCINE RACE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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Full Text:
Wadman, Meredith THE VACCINE RACE Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 2, 7 ISBN: 9780525427537
A dramatic medical history that reveals the progress and the stumbles, the personalities and the rivalries, in the race to
find a vaccine for rubella, or German measles. Science magazine writer Wadman, who has a medical degree from
Oxford and a journalism degree from Columbia, has long covered the politics of biomedical research. As she makes
immediately clear, rubella, like Zika, inflicts terrible damage on babies whose mothers are infected during their
pregnancies. In the 1960s, the search for a safe and effective vaccine was just beginning. Wadman focuses on Leonard
Hayflick and Stanley Plotkin, scientists at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology at the University of
Pennsylvania, and cell line WI38, derived from the lungs of a fetus legally aborted in Sweden (and used without the
mother's consent), which subsequently became key to developing a vaccine that has been given to hundreds of millions
of people. Besides informing readers of the role of fetal tissue in biomedical research, the author reveals the shocking
methods used by researchers to test vaccines: prior to today's stringent laws about informed consent, the test subjects
were often institutionalized mentally disabled children. Rivalries and shenanigans abound in Wadman's complex story.
One night, Hayflick removed ampules of the cell line from the lab at Wistar, packed them up in his car, and carried
them to his new job at Stanford University. Accusations and lawsuits ensued, as well as struggles for funding, and
pharmaceutical companies and government agencies eventually became major players. Wadman's story is much more
than just the rubella story, however, for it doesn't end with that vaccine. Strains derived from WI38 are used today in
the manufacture of most human virus vaccines, including those for polio, shingles, mumps, rabies, and hepatitis, and
Hayflick's work with cell biology has led to discoveries that have significant implications for theories of human aging.
An important story well told, featuring the drama and characters needed to make this a candidate for film adaptation.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Wadman, Meredith: THE VACCINE RACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652319&it=r&asid=6cbe4dc17e76e1815013b41106bf6a3e.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
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Quoted in Sidelights: an exemplary piece of medical
journalism,
Wadman makes strikingly clear the human costs of medical developments
.
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the
Human Costs of Defeating Disease
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p139.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease
Meredith Wadman. Viking, $30 (448p)
ISBN 9780525427537
Wadman, staff writer for Science, depicts the cutthroat competition, ugly politics, brilliant science, and questionable
ethics that underscored the research and development, during the 1960s and '70s, of vaccines that have protected many
millions of Americans from rubella, polio, rabies, and other diseases. She provides an excellent introductory primer on
cell biology to complement colorful sketches of the personalities of the pioneering biologists who produced the first
live vaccines while challenging scientific tenets and medical ethics. The book is not for the squeamish. Wadman details
the surgical and laboratory processes scientists used to develop vaccines, and describes the testing of vaccine
prototypes on both children and adultsdone mostly without their consent, in orphanages, asylums, schools, and
prisons. She also documents the beginnings of the biotechnology industry in the 1980s and the concomitant rise and fall
of Leonard Hayflick, who created the crucial WI38 cell strain and entered into multimillion dollar business agreements
before coming under investigation by the National Institutes of Health and getting embroiled in a muchpublicized
court battle with the U.S. government over ownership of the valuable cells. This is an exemplary piece of medical
journalism, and Wadman makes strikingly clear the human costs of medical developments as well as the roles of
politics and economics. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p.
139. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225103&it=r&asid=77b943ea3d73482dfd5106c2c1cbe94c.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225103
Quoted in Sidelights:
It is an extraordinary story and Wadman is to be congratulated, not just for uncovering it but for relaying it in such a pacy, stimulating manner. This is a first-class piece of science writing that does considerable justice to Hayflick, a character who achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble.
The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses by Meredith Wadman – review
The extraordinary story of the man who risked his career to create vaccines against our worst diseases
Rows of syringes
Germ warfare … Leonard Hayflick’s use of human cells helped pave the way to a revolution in public health. Photograph: Alamy
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Robin McKie
Monday 27 February 2017 02.30 EST
In March 1968, biologist Leonard Hayflick visited the basement of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia. He was seeking a set of 375 vials, each bearing the code WI-38. Once found, he placed them in a nitrogen-cooled container and then hid them in a friend’s house. He informed no one at Wistar, his former employer, of his actions.
A few days later, Hayflick transported the vials to Stanford University, where he had just been made professor of medical microbiology. There he started to sell them to drug companies.
Germ warfare: the battle for the key to modern vaccines
Read more
Each vial contained several million cells grown from a single aborted human foetus. Infected with rubella, polio, rabies, hepatitis A and other viruses, the WI-38 cells would act as hosts for growing these viruses so they could be used as the basis of vaccines, Hayflick argued. Crucially, they would be free of contaminants that had recently been found in vaccines made from viruses grown in animal cells – not an issue for his pristine foetal cells.
A gifted experimenter, Hayflick had created the WI-38s (which stands for Wistar Institute sample 38) in 1962. They were the world’s first line of normal, noncancerous human cells and held fantastic promise. However, they were not Hayflick’s property. They belonged to the Wistar Institute, and their removal – and subsequent sale for profit – left him wide open to charges of theft. In the end, he only narrowly avoided prosecution. So why did the biologist take such extraordinary action?
Meredith Wadman is clear about the source of Hayflick’s woes. He was working under duress, reined back by “obdurate, ultra-conservative, self-protective vaccine regulators” who were preventing him from using his cells for vaccine work. Hence his decision to sell them on the quiet to pharmaceuticals companies.
The move would haunt Hayflick for the rest of his life. He was hounded from office and never received the accolades he deserved for deriving his cells (which are still used by vaccine makers today). It took a decade of procrastination before US regulators capitulated and approved his cells for vaccine development. (Europe was far quicker off the mark.) Since then, more than 6bn vaccine doses based on his cells have protected the west against rubella, rabies, chicken pox, and other lethal or debilitating illnesses.
Hayflick achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble
In the case of rubella, which can cause severe foetal damage in pregnant women, the vaccine halted infections and stopped mothers seeking abortions as they had done widely in the past after finding themselves infected in early pregnancy. Thus a vaccine – itself based on aborted foetal tissue – had a far greater pro-life effect than all the efforts of anti-abortion religious activists.
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It is an extraordinary story and Wadman is to be congratulated, not just for uncovering it but for relaying it in such a pacy, stimulating manner. This is a first-class piece of science writing that does considerable justice to Hayflick, a character who achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble.
For long periods in his later life, Hayflick, a family man, was cold-shouldered by US academia and he had to scrabble for work in the wake of his raid on Wistar’s freezers. In a fair world, he should have been heading departments of leading researchers although today, aged 86, he does find himself at least partially rehabilitated, having served as an adviser to several biotech companies and authored some well-received books.
Much of this restoration concerns the crucial role he played in the field of ageing research, for in developing his WI-38 cells, Hayflick discovered an intriguing fact. There was an upper limit for the number of times each of his cells would divide – known today as the Hayflick limit. Previously, scientists thought that cells in a culture could continue to divide for ever. The existence of an upper limit gave scientists a means to explore cellular senescence, by homing in on the mechanism that regulates the limiting of cell division and so creating a flourishing field that today offers important insights into cancer and ageing.
More to the point, Hayflick’s relentless campaigning for the right to use human cells – instead of animal cells – to make vaccines helped speed up a revolution in public health in the west, though few thanked him at the time. Nevertheless, he played a key role in the victory in the war against viral diseases such as rubella and polio, an achievement that freed us from truly terrible scourges.
This point is worth recalling when some individuals, including Donald Trump, openly question the worth and effectiveness of vaccines. For them, Alan Shaw, a former vaccine researcher, has a perfect response quoted by Wadman. “Developing vaccines is probably one of the most productive things you can do, simply because if you succeed in getting one made, you watch a disease disappear.”
• The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman is published by Doubleday (£20). To order a copy for £16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Book review: The Vaccine Race, by Meredith Wadman Mass inoculation for Polio, Protection, Kansas, 1957 PIC:: The Art Archive/REX/Shutterstock ROB EWING 11:46Wednesday 01 March 2017 0 HAVE YOUR SAY The Scotsman’s monthly review of a book about health, promoted by Wellcome Making vaccines is difficult. Or more precisely, making safe vaccines is difficult. In 1942 around 330,000 US servicemen were exposed to the Hepatitis B virus after being given a yellow fever vaccine contaminated with donor plasma; nearly 150 of them subsequently died. Then in 1955 a polio vaccine with live (not attenuated) virus paralysed almost 200 people, and killed 10. So at the start of 1960s the race was on to create vaccines that were not only effective, but also safe. Viruses grow and replicate inside cells. Therefore in order to create viral vaccines in bulk, ready supplies of cells are a prerequisite. Ideally, these cells should, to paraphrase the American anatomy professor Leonard Hayflick, be clean, safe, normal and noncancerous. This would necessarily rule out the famed HeLa cells (everlasting cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, and described in Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks); but what cells to use instead? This is the focus of Meredith Wadman’s excellent new book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. Hayflick’s research into cell lines, described in the book, was pivotal in the creation of a critical rubella vaccine, at a time when major epidemics of the illness caused terrible birth defects. At the outset of Hayflick’s career in the late 1950s, there was growing awareness that cell cultures derived from animals might contain unrevealed viruses which could cause illness, or even trigger cancers. His goal was to find (and mass-produce) the safest human cells for vaccine production. This he eventually achieved by using lung cells from the aborted fetus of a Swedish woman, identified in the book only as Mrs X. Her permission was never sought for this: one of many dubious ethical decisions which Wadman’s book explores. She also describes how orphans held in institutions and infants born to women in prison were used to test the experimental vaccines utilising Hayflick’s cells and then, perhaps most contentious of all, Hayflick’s decision in 1968 to take all of his cell cultures (catchily named WI-38s) with him to his new professorship at Stanford University, when in fact he had agreed to leave some behind at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania. This would lead to a long-running legal battle which almost ended Hayflick’s career – though ultimately it was also the catalyst for proper legislation regarding the ownership of cells and the process of vaccine creation. Rubella, or German measles, was at that time one of the main targets for vaccine research. Major outbreaks were occurring every six years or so. The illness in children and adults is generally mild; but for women contracting rubella during early pregnancy it’s a different matter entirely. The virus targets growing cells at a specific phase of fetal development, causing Congenital Rubella: heart defects, hearing loss and eye defects, in a clinical syndrome first described by Dr Norman Gregg, an Australian ophthalmologist. In the US alone, 20,000 babies were born with Congenital Rubella during the 1964 outbreak, and in the aftermath there was a desperate need for safe, mass-produced vaccines before the next major outbreak, anticipated to be in 1970. Wadman makes fascinating comparisons between rubella and the currently newsworthy Zika virus: both viruses causing mild illness in the mother, but major birth defects in the fetus. But her book really hits its stride is in part two, where it focuses on rubella, and horrifyingly, rabies – the case descriptions of children affected by this illness are heartbreaking. Despite the title, however, it’s a slow starter, possibly too detailed in places, and I must admit to glazing over at mentions of biotech shareholder dividends and US government legislation. Also, I would have liked more about the MMR scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s, described elsewhere as “Perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years,” if only to show how much mass vaccination is taken for granted today. Hayflick’s WI-38 cells – shared widely around the world – have helped to provide vaccines against (among others) polio, measles, rabies, chicken pox, and hepatitis A. To date billions of people have been vaccinated. The Vaccine Race takes in all of this, plus cell death, human ageing and the ethical dilemmas of owning living tissue, and is in the end an important story, well told. n *The Vaccine Race, by Meredith Wadman, Doubleday, 448pp, £20 *Rob Ewing is an Edinburgh-based GP. His debut novel The Last of Us was published last year by the Borough Press, and he was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award.
Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-the-vaccine-race-by-meredith-wadman-1-4379856
Wadman’s research is extensive, and her book is packed with anecdotes and details of the science, the times, and the people. But many readers may find descriptions of Hayflick’s work overly detailed or wonder whether the backstories of incidental characters add much.
recalls a breakthrough that has faded in our collective memory, owing to its success in all but eliminating a major cause of birth defects across a wide swath of the world.
Tracking race to develop vaccine to head off birth defects from rubella
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FOTOLIA
By Helen Branswell
STAT FEBRUARY 03, 2017
It’s not every family that moves cross-country with a pair of kids sharing the back seat of a Buick LeSabre with a freezer stuffed with bottles of cell culture of disputed ownership.
But in 1968 Leonard Hayflick and three of his five children made that journey from Philadelphia to the San Francisco area, where Hayflick was to take up a professorship at Stanford University. (His wife and their two youngest children flew.)
The biological materials he took with him — cultures full of cells he’d developed and named WI-38s — were arguably the property of the National Cancer Institute, though Hayflick felt that point was disputable. And dispute he and the government did in the years that followed.
Hayflick is one of the main players in the story of the creation of a critical rubella vaccine recounted in Meredith Wadman’s new book, “The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease.’’
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A staff writer for the magazine Science, Wadman chronicles the painstaking research conducted by Hayflick, a denture maker’s son from Philadelphia, to generate cell cultures derived from fetal tissue, the frustrating but ultimately successful efforts of his colleague, Stanley Plotkin, to use the cultures to produce a safe rubella vaccine, and their struggles to get US vaccine regulators to accept products derived from fetal-tissue cultures.
Wadman, who has a medical degree from Oxford, also examines actions by researchers and others that would not pass ethical muster today.
Before the creation of the vaccines major outbreaks of rubella — also known as German measles — swept through every six or seven years. The effects of the disease, which is most common in children, were typically mild.
But rubella infection during pregnancy was another matter. The virus attacked fetuses in the womb, slowing development of key types of cells. It is estimated that 20,000 babies in the nation were born with congenital rubella syndrome in the outbreak of 1964-65. Some were left deaf, others blind, still others with cognitive impairment. Heart defects were common, as were combinations of conditions.
The threat of the next wave of rubella, expected around 1970, prompted a push to develop vaccines.
The mid-1960s outbreak occurred at a time when the science of vaccine development was taking off, aided by research that had shown how to grow disease-causing viruses in sufficient quantity to make protective serums.
Viruses do not grow on their own; they need to hijack the replicative capacity of living cells. The types of cells used varies; viruses intended for influenza vaccines, for example, are mostly grown in hen’s eggs.
When Hayflick’s career at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology was starting, concerns were emerging that some cell cultures derived from animals might contain other viruses that could harm people or trigger cancers. He set out to produce safe cells, using tissue from a fetus aborted by a woman in Sweden identified in the book only as Mrs. X.
Mrs. X’s story bears a resemblance to that of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 and whose history was recounted in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 bestseller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.’’ Without informing her family, researchers used cells from Lacks’s tumor to create cell lines that to this day remain a staple of scientific research.
Wadman tracked Mrs. X down in 2013, but she declined to be interviewed. Millions of dollars have been made from the sales of vaccines made with cells from her aborted fetus, but she was neither informed nor paid a cent. “They were doing this without my knowledge. That cannot be allowed today,” she simply told Wadman’s Swedish research assistant.
Many other events the book records couldn’t be done today either. Orphans, children institutionalized for cognitive impairments, and babies born to women in prison farms were used to test the experimental vaccines grown in Hayflick’s cells, with greater or lesser degrees of consent from parents or guardians.
Hayflick decision to leave Wistar — he felt undervalued and Stanford offered a full professorship plus more pay — triggered a crisis over the cell cultures he’d so laboriously created. NCI had paid for the work and by contract owned the cells, though it had agreed to give Hayflick and Wistar a few vials. But Hayflick took them all.
Wadman’s research is extensive, and her book is packed with anecdotes and details of the science, the times, and the people. But many readers may find descriptions of Hayflick’s work overly detailed or wonder whether the backstories of incidental characters add much. And some may wish, especially in the first part of the book, that Wadman pruned and pared more aggressively. The race promised in the title does materialize, but it’s a bit of a slow build.
Still, “The Vaccine Race” recalls a breakthrough that has faded in our collective memory, owing to its success in all but eliminating a major cause of birth defects across a wide swath of the world.
THE VACCINE RACE:
Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease
By Meredith Wadman
Viking, 436 pp, illustrated, $30
Quoted in Sidelights: Capturing the human side of vaccine development, and explaining the science with clarity and precision, Wadman has written an intelligent and entertaining tome that will be of interest to scientists, regulators, and lay readers alike.
A well-researched tome reveals the people who helped make early vaccines possible
By Erica C. Jonlin
January 31, 2017
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease
Meredith Wadman
Viking
2017
448 pp.
Purchase this item now
Meredith Wadman’s meticulously researched and carefully crafted book, The Vaccine Race, is an enlightening telling of the development of vaccines in the mid-20th century. Drawing from firsthand interviews, personal correspondence, journal articles, and governmental archival documents, Wadman relates the work of the brilliant scientists who toiled for years to develop vaccines against diseases including polio, rubella, and rabies; the experiences of vulnerable individuals who were unwittingly enrolled in vaccine trials; and the suffering of families and individuals devastated by diseases that have since been nearly eradicated by vaccination. Capturing the human side of vaccine development, and explaining the science with clarity and precision, Wadman has written an intelligent and entertaining tome that will be of interest to scientists, regulators, and lay readers alike.
The book’s narrative centers largely around Leonard Hayflick: a brilliant, dogged, infinitely patient, and often obdurate researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia who derived the WI-38 cell line from the lung cells of a fetus legally aborted in Sweden in 1962. Unlike other human cells grown in culture, the WI-38 cell line was capable of growing normally for many passages without acquiring mutations. Although Hayflick repeatedly demonstrated that WI-38 was free of viruses and more efficacious than the nonhuman cell lines commonly used to make vaccines at the time, politics, egotistical personalities, recalcitrant regulators, and brutal competition led WI-38 cells to be rejected again and again for production of vaccines.
Frustrated by a lack of recognition for his work, Hayflick left the Wistar Institute for Stanford in 1968 and—in a spectacular act of vigilantism—took the WI-38 cells with him, just as the NIH and Wistar officials were about to take possession of them. Hayflick’s “theft” and his subsequent acceptance of payments in exchange for starter cultures of the cells would eventually lead to an NIH investigation, jeopardizing his career and leading to the loss of his position and funding. As Wadman demonstrates, however, Hayflick’s actions also catalyzed a sea change in intellectual property law and scientific entrepreneurialism in the United States.
CLASSICSTOCK/ALAMY
A child prepares to receive a vaccination against polio in 1957.
The Vaccine Race brings the reader from the hallowed halls of the Wistar Institute to hospitals for the poor, orphanages, homes for pregnant teenagers, and a women’s prison. Here, young scientists eager to make their mark found experimental research subjects whose caregivers gave consent on their behalf. Acknowledging how shocking these practices seem to us today, Wadman illustrates, without criticism, the hubris of the investigators who believed that their vaccines were safe enough to proceed with human testing (they had been tested extensively in animals, after all). Indeed, a strength of the book is Wadman’s objectivity and lack of judgment regarding research approaches that were typical in their time.
Wadman is also to be commended for highlighting the contributions of a number of female scientists, philanthropists, and administrators during these early days of vaccine development. Important players included women such as Ruth Kirschstein, a pathologist in the NIH Division of Biologics Standards, who reviewed vaccine applications and helped to refine their testing protocols; Dorothy Horstmann, a clinician and epidemiologist who demonstrated the superiority of a new rubella vaccine; and Mary Lasker, a philanthropist who made significant financial and strategic contributions to vaccine initiatives.
Wadman’s book necessarily recounts the history of cell culture, since without it there could be no vaccine production. But the laboratory conditions under which early 20th-century science was conducted may surprise modern scientists. There were no fume hoods, for example, and mouth pipetting was standard practice, even for allocating serum. Tens of thousands of monkeys were sacrificed in the quest to make a polio vaccine; many more were used for preclinical testing—numbers unimaginable today.
The last third of The Vaccine Race places Hayflick and the WI-38 cell line in historical context, as Wadman discusses the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which enabled universities and private research institutions to patent federally funded inventions; the establishment of the biotech industry; the growth of ties between industry and academia; and the increasing acceptance of scientists as entrepreneurs.
Wadman raises questions that arose in the early days of vaccine development: Who owns donated specimens, and should donors be compensated? She acknowledges that these are unresolved issues that we are still grappling with today.
In the end, we are left with a comprehensive portrait of the many issues faced in the race to develop vaccines: the tension between regulators and the regulated, brutal competition, uncertain funding, controversies over the use of fetal tissue, questions of how and in whom we should test experimental products, and issues of intellectual property.
Editor’s note:
Meredith Wadman joined the Science staff while this review was in preparation. No alterations were made to the review in light of this development.
About the author
The reviewer is at the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98109, USA.
Quoted in Sidelights: While there is some highly technical science at the heart of this tale, the casual reader shouldn’t be dissuaded by the digressions about the intricacies of cellular biology or the 50 pages of footnotes. Wadman does a superb job of making the technical comprehensible to the lay reader
While the science is fascinating, the foibles of the main characters are what keep the reader gripped.
Title The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease
Author Meredith Wadman
Publisher Viking
Pages 436
Price $40
Immunization is a remarkably simple concept: A person injected – or otherwise exposed – with a tiny bit of virus will develop antibodies and be protected from infection and illness. Edward Jenner knew this way back in 1798, when he developed the first vaccine against smallpox by scraping pus from the blistered hands of a milkmaid who had been exposed to cowpox, and injecting it into an eight-year-old boy.
But, while the theory is simple, the practice of making vaccines is anything but: The challenge – once the bug-causing illness has been identified – is to stimulate the immune system so it will create antibodies, but do so without infecting the person with the virus, or with other pathogens that might quietly go along for the ride. Scientists have spent the past 220 years trying to improve on Jenner’s crude technique, with remarkable success, but with no shortage of failures and drama.
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease focuses on the period in the 1960s and 70s when the science of vaccinology advanced at breakneck speed, and when cell biology transformed from a vocation to a big-money enterprise.
Specifically, author Meredith Wadman, a Canadian physician who is a reporter at Science magazine, zeroes in on the development of vaccines for rubella (also known as German measles) and, to a lesser extent, rabies, but more precisely on the mind-boggling history of WI-38 cells, which would revolutionize vaccine making. Prior to the development of the technique to grow non-cancerous human cells such as WI-38 in the lab, vaccines were made with monkey cells, which sometimes carried other viruses along with them, such as the SV40 simian vaccine that tainted the Salk polio vaccine.
While there is some highly technical science at the heart of this tale, the casual reader shouldn’t be dissuaded by the digressions about the intricacies of cellular biology or the 50 pages of footnotes. Wadman does a superb job of making the technical comprehensible to the lay reader and, more importantly, makes the science come to life by honing in on the brilliant men and women who were driven to create new, life-saving vaccines – and profit from their discoveries.
There are three central figures in the book, all of them associated with the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology at the University of Philadelphia: Leonard Hayflick, a biologist who derived WI-38 cells from the lungs of an aborted fetus, and a man who felt he was never adequately recognized (financially and otherwise) and carried a large chip on his shoulder; Hilary Koprowski, a ruthlessly ambitious virologist who headed the Wistar, where he attracted top talent and allowed scientific inquiry to flourish, determined to leave his mark on science; and Stanley Plotkin, a bookish pediatrician who developed the rubella vaccine and became a legend in the field.
Scientists who make world-beating discoveries are often portrayed as heroic figures in retrospective tomes, but Wadman takes a more journalistic approach, profiling the trio warts and all.
While the ambitions, actions and epochal feuds of the three men dominate The Vaccine Race, there is another figure, rarely mentioned, always lurking in the shadows. Mrs. X, a Swedish mother whose aborted fetus was the source of WI-38 cells, never gave her consent and has never been compensated, despite the fact that that those cells have been used to manufacturer 300 million vaccines, and the technique developed by Hayflick to grow cells in the lab has been used to manufacture six billion vaccines and generate enormous profits. (A single vaccine, Merck’s MMR – measles, mumps, rubella – still has sales of $1.5-billion [U.S.] annually.)
The Mrs. X subtext has resulted in comparisons to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book by Rebecca Skloot that tells the remarkable story of HeLa cells, cancerous cells drawn from Mrs. Lacks, without her consent, that helped launched a scientific revolution. (Her family is suing for compensation.)
In many ways, The Vaccine Race is an unofficial sequel, because what Hayflick did was grow “normal” (non-cancerous cells) that are now the basis for vaccine production with nary a thought to the donor. And that is the least of the dubious ethical practices that are revealed.
Both Koprowski and Plotkin tested vaccines on intellectually disabled and orphaned children, as well as prisoners, something that today would probably be criminal behaviour. But Wadman does a good job of contextualizing these seemingly incomprehensible acts, explaining that the fear of childhood diseases such as polio and rubella created an almost war-like, the end-justifies-the-means mentality.
While the science is fascinating, the foibles of the main characters are what keep the reader gripped. Hayflick is ultimately the most perplexing, and in some ways pathetic, of the lot. While he was viewed very much as a lab technician by other scientists, his accomplishments were extraordinary. He not only created the first self-replicating human cells, but laid the foundations for the study of cellular aging and the biotechnology industry.
But Hayflick also behaved like a petty thief, stealing off in the night with ampoules of WI-38 cells that clearly did not belong to him, and then sold them for personal gain, however paltry. The protracted legal battle that ensued almost destroyed his career. But this occurred in an era when scientists were only beginning to commercialize their findings so he was, in many ways, slightly ahead of his time, the scientist who tried to profit from biotechnology just before that gold rush began in earnest.
Like many early explorers, these scientists left an indelible mark, and a lot of collateral damage, in their wake.
André Picard is the health columnist at The Globe and Mail. His new book, Matters of Life and Death: Public Health Issues in Canada, will be published in April.