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In 2016, Bill Gates once commented on a person: He may have saved more lives than any scientist in the 20th century. And Fauci said that this person is also unknown in the scientific community.
Saved so many people but didn’t become famous. This person is Maurice Hilleman.
Maurice Hilleman Image source: nfid.org
Hillemann developed more than 40 kinds of vaccines in his life, and now he invented 8 of the 14 kinds of conventional vaccines for children. He is also the first person in the world who successfully predicted and stopped the pandemic of infectious diseases.
It is estimated that the vaccine developed in Hillemann saves 8 million lives every year. It is no exaggeration to say that he is the guardian of your life and mine. Today, let’s take a look at this hero who does not strive for fame and success.
Hillerman was born on August 40, 1919, the eighth child in his family. Shortly after his birth, his mother and twin sister also passed away. Later, he was adopted to a childless uncle family. Uncle Bichler Mann’s biological father is more enlightened, so he has more opportunities to explore and expand his hobbies.
Childhood Hillemann Image Source: hillemanfilm.com
It is such a child who is interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Because of his poor family, he almost didn’t go to college. After graduating from high school, he got a job at J. C. Penney, and he planned to spend his life like this. Fortunately, his eldest brother mediated and helped him get a scholarship from Montana State University. In 1941, he graduated from the school with the first grade.
Then he went to the University of Chicago to study for a doctorate. During his PhD, he studied chlamydia, the pathogen of a common sexually transmitted disease.
In the 1940s, the medical community generally classified chlamydia as a virus. However, Hillemann discovered through research that Chlamydia trachomatis is a special kind of bacteria. Chlamydia trachomatis can only live in cells and is a parasitic bacterium.
Chlamydia trachomatis (brown) Image source: wikipedia
Since it is caused by bacteria, chlamydia can be treated with antibiotics. This is the first city captured by Hillemann for human health.
After obtaining his doctorate, he did not stay in academia, but entered a pharmaceutical company called E.R. Squibb & Sons and began to develop vaccines.
He quickly developed his first vaccine: Japanese encephalitis vaccine. Most encephalitis is caused by Japanese encephalitis virus. After being infected by Japanese encephalitis virus, the patient’s brain swells and the mortality rate is high. During World War II, the Japanese encephalitis vaccine developed by Hillemann was used to immunize the US military.
Japanese encephalitis virus is transmitted by mosquitoes.
In 1949, Hillemann became the chief scientist of respiratory diseases in The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, when he began to study influenza virus.
During this period, he made several important discoveries about influenza virus. He pointed out to the world for the first time that the spike protein on the surface of influenza virus will change, avoiding the recognition of immune system. Everyone should have heard of spike protein. This year, the COVID-19 vaccine jointly developed by German pharmaceutical company BioNTech and Pfizer was immunized by training human immune system to recognize spike protein on the surface of Covid-19.
Later, biologists called this change of virus antigenic drift, and the major variation was called antigenic shift.
Antigenic transformation often leads to epidemic outbreaks, because few people in the world are immune to the new virus after the virus mutates.
In order to achieve antigenic transformation, the influenza virus that infects people needs two tool animals: birds and pigs. Pigs can be infected by both avian influenza virus and human influenza virus. Therefore, the two viruses can communicate in pigs to form a new and stronger influenza virus.
Hillemann’s discovery explains why the flu vaccine developed by the US military usually fails in the second year, and also helps him save millions of lives.
On April 17th, 1957, The New York Times reported the news of a large-scale influenza outbreak in Hongkong. Many Americans don’t think this is a disaster in a foreign country, and it has nothing to do with themselves. But Hillemann was keenly aware that the news was not simple.
During the Asian flu in July 1968, patients waiting for treatment in a clinic in Hong Kong. Image source: SCMP
The day after reading this report, he sent a telegram to an army medical general laboratory in Zama, Japan, and obtained the saliva of an infected American soldier.
After studying the patient’s saliva, Hillemann found that only a small group of old people who had experienced the "Russian influenza" pandemics in 1889 and 1890 had immunity, while younger people had no resistance to the new influenza virus.
Hillemann realized that the global influenza pandemic had arrived, and began to actively promote the development of influenza vaccine before the start of school in autumn.
In September 1957, an epidemic named the Asian flu entered the United States. However, at that time, the United States had produced and distributed 40 million doses of influenza vaccine, and the research and development time of the vaccine was only four months.
This is the attendance of a primary school in Tokyo when the Asian flu broke out at that time.
In the end, this virus (Type A2) called "Asian Influenza" caused about 70,000 deaths in the United States. But in 1957-1958, the virus caused about 2 million deaths worldwide.
Leonard Burney, then director of the US Department of Health, said that without this vaccine, millions of people in the United States would have died of the flu.
In this way, Hillemann became the first person in history to accurately predict the pandemic. Because of this incident, Hillemann was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the US military.
At the end of 1957, Hillemann began to work for Merck Pharmaceuticals and stayed there until he retired. At Merck, he developed vaccines against chickenpox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, streptococcus pneumoniae, meningococcus, measles, mumps and rubella.
Mumps often leads to deafness. Image source: wikipedia
Hillemann was also the first person to integrate antiviral vaccines. With the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, children can gain immunity to measles, mumps and rubella only once.
Mumps vaccine has reduced the number of patients in the United States from 200,000 to 200 every year. The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccine alone prevented 20.3 million deaths worldwide from 2000 to 2015.
There is another interesting story when it comes to the measles-mumps triple vaccine.
In fact, the virus used to make mumps vaccine was extracted from his adopted daughter Jeryl Lynn. Until now, the virus strain from his daughter is still being used to make mumps vaccine, and this virus strain is also named Jeryl Lynn strain.
Hillemann’s last invention-hepatitis B vaccine also made him the first person to fight cancer-liver cancer with a vaccine.
Hepatitis B virus is a major pathogen of liver cancer, the third largest cancer in the world. According to Baruch Blumberg, the Nobel Prize winner in 1976, there are about 375 million people in the world who are carriers of hepatitis B virus, and they are all at risk of liver cancer.
In order to develop hepatitis B vaccine, Hillemann did a very dangerous thing-purified hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) from the blood of patients with hepatitis B and made hepatitis B vaccine.
Schematic diagram of hepatitis B surface antigen (purple)
There are two reasons why this matter is dangerous: First, in the process of research, hepatitis B virus may infect researchers.
Secondly, who wants to try a vaccine made of patient plasma at the cost of his life? After all, the protein of hepatitis B surface antigen is what hepatitis B virus does in human body to avoid the attack of immune system. Many people without medical background are afraid that they may be infected with hepatitis B after being injected with this protein.
In order to prove the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, Hillemann personally went into battle and injected hepatitis B vaccine under the watchful eye of everyone.
Hillemann was vaccinated with the first generation of hepatitis B vaccine. Image source: vaccine makers project
However, because a new deadly disease, AIDS, appeared in the 1980s, many people were afraid that the hepatitis B vaccine purified from plasma might also carry the pathogen of AIDS, so the first generation of hepatitis B vaccine was in trouble.
However, Hillemann’s team soon found a way to make hepatitis B vaccine without human plasma. In 1986, they used gene technology to successfully make yeast produce HBsAg.
This vaccine is now used in 150 countries around the world. By 2003, the number of young hepatitis B patients in the United States had dropped by 95% compared with before the emergence of vaccines. Hepatitis B vaccine may be the medical product that saved the most people in the 20th century.
Hillemann believes that hepatitis B vaccine is the most important job in his life. Thomas Studds, a pioneer of liver transplantation, praised hepatitis B vaccine as "one of the greatest contributions to medicine in the 20th century. Hillemann has removed the biggest obstacle in the field of organ transplantation. "
After retirement, Hillemann became a consultant of the World Health Organization. In 1988, President Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science award, the highest honor in American science.
Image source: the Hilleman Family
Although many people’s lives depend on him, few people outside the circle know his name and he didn’t win the Nobel Prize.
Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV virus, the pathogen of AIDS, once said: "If you want to name a person who has made great contributions to human health, but has not received due recognition, this person is Hillemann."
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even said: "Even in the scientific community, few people know how much Morris has contributed. I recently asked my postdoctoral fellow if he knew who developed measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B and chickenpox vaccines. They said they didn’t know. "
Hillemann didn’t go out of the circle because of his low profile. Hillemann didn’t sign a paper to prove the effectiveness of hepatitis B vaccine, nor did he name any vaccine with his own name.
Hillemann seems to be the embodiment of human immune system. A healthy human body can’t benefit from the immune system, but TA has been silently protecting you in an invisible place.
Hillemann saved the most people in the 20th century, and some people’s hard disks saved the most people in the 21st century.
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Reference materials are stored in graphite:
https://shimo.im/docs/cxWWVjVhRkTQ3YJc/
Original title: "Gates: He saved more lives than any scientist in the 20th century, but Fauci said he was unknown in the scientific community."
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