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The Vaccine Race - Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease (Paperback)
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The Vaccine Race - Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease (Paperback)
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"A real jewel of science history...brims with suspense and
now-forgotten catastrophe and intrigue...Wadman's smooth prose
calmly spins a surpassingly complicated story into a real tour de
force."-The New York Times "Riveting . . . [The Vaccine Race]
invites comparison with Rebecca Skloot's 2007 The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks."-Nature 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, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles and
adenovirus. Meredith Wadman's masterful account recovers not only
the science of this urgent race, but also the political roadblocks
that nearly stopped the scientists. She describes the terrible
dilemmas of pregnant women exposed to German measles and recounts
testing on infants, prisoners, orphans, and the intellectually
disabled, which was common in the era. These events take place at
the dawn of the battle over using human fetal tissue in research,
during the arrival of big commerce in campus labs, and as huge
changes take place in the laws and practices governing who "owns"
research cells and the profits made from biological inventions. It
is also the story of yet one more unrecognized woman whose cells
have been used to save countless lives. With another frightening
virus--measles--on the rise today, no medical story could have more
human drama, impact, or urgency than The Vaccine Race.
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