The fastest vaccine ever developed

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2020

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

In the 1960s five-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman got ill with mumps. Her father Dr Maurice Hilleman took a swab from the back of her throat and used it to help create a vaccine for the disease - more quickly than any previous vaccine had ever been completed. During his decades long career Dr Hilleman worked on vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis and meningitis.

Photo: Jeryl Lynn Hilleman with her sister, Kirsten, in 1966 as a doctor gave her the mumps vaccine developed by their father Maurice Hilleman. Courtesy of Merck.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds
0:30.9	you're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Helen
0:40.0	Grady.
0:41.0	Today as scientists race to find a vaccine for COVID-19, we travel to
0:46.6	19-60's America to meet the scientific giant you've probably never heard of,
0:52.1	the world's fastest vaccine maker.
0:55.0	Under sterile conditions similar to an operating room and after a number of other
0:59.6	processing steps the virus fluids are pooled, clarified, and later freeze-dried to produce
1:06.1	the final vaccine.
1:07.9	In his lab in West Point, Pennsylvania, Dr. Maurice Hillerman worked to develop more vaccines than anyone else.
1:15.0	My father had a list of diseases that he felt needed to be addressed.
1:21.0	Like a hit list.
1:22.0	Very much like a hit list. Very much like a hit list. Born in
1:24.8	19 during the Spanish flu pandemic, the young Maurice had a tough upbringing in
1:30.5	rural Montana. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother and
	...

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