Merck's Vaccine Expert Has Turned Dreams into Realities

Life was often rugged on the Montana farm in the Western Frontier where Dr. Maurice Hilleman, Director of the Merck Institute for Vaccinology, spent his boyhood. "It was during the economic Depression," he recalls. "And there were droughts. Bitter winters. Insects. Even plagues."

Whether despite of or because of these rigors, the farm was the perfect training ground for a future scientist. "It was a crucible for learning," he says. "You had to know animals and crops, machinery and electricity. You had to feed the chickens when they needed to be fed and repair fences when they needed repair. You learned to rely on hard work, not luck. Most of all, you learned to be a useful citizen."

In the years that followed, those lessons of childhood became the imperative of a remarkable career. On January 29 of this year, he mounted a platform in Bangkok, Thailand to accept the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health from the King of Thailand. It was impossible to say how many in that venue, so distant from his Montana homeland, owed their health, their well-being, their very lives to the tall, plainspoken scientist.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer observed in 1999, it is possible that Dr. Hilleman has saved more lives than any living scientist. This is no overstatement, considering that Dr. Hilleman's accomplishments include vaccines against mumps, measles, rubella, chicken pox, bacterial meningitis and pneumonia, flu, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and many more disease entities. As a result, entire generations of well-inoculated Americans have escaped diseases that were once the scourge of childhood.

With the Prince Mahidol award, named for that country's "Father of Modern Medicine and Public Health" and considered the "Nobel Prize of Asia," the Republic of Thailand became only the most recent country to honor Dr. Hilleman. In 1957 he earned the Distinguished Civilian Service Award from the United States; 31 years later President Reagan presented him with this country's National Medal of Science. He's been similarly honored in Germany, Morocco, San Marino, Bulgaria, by the World Health Organization and by dozens of medical and professional societies including his receipt of the Lasker Medical Research Award. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, its Institute of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Yet, as a boy in Montana, a career in medical research appeared to be out of the question. His family could ill afford the expense of a state college and he wasn't inclined to follow some of his older brothers into the option of education for the ministry. Instead he entered management training at the local J. C. Penney store where he spent three months as a clerk. His department store days came to a halt, however, when his eldest brother returned and strongly urged that the youngest Hilleman enter college. Shortly thereafter, the 18-year-old entered Montana State College with a scholarship where he graduated first in his class, with majors in microbiology and chemistry, and earned a fellowship to the University of Chicago.

"The University of Chicago was Mecca," he says. "Many great names in science were there." As a grad student he made a major breakthrough of his own when he succeeded in producing antibodies against Chlamydia in chickens, a process which opened the door for understanding these agents as described in his prize winning Ph.D. thesis of 1944.

But his Chicago mentors were distraught when their newly minted Ph.D. decided to join a pharmaceutical company (Squibb Pharmaceutical Laboratories). "Back then, academics looked down on industry," says Dr. Hilleman. "But I wanted to apply what I'd learned, and to see discoveries become realities."

At the age of 25, his zeal to produce results became vital to the country's on-going war effort -- and to hundreds of thousands of American troops -- when he was charged with developing a vaccine against Japanese B encephalitis, common in the Far East. "We devised a process for the vaccine and started into production within a month," he recalls.

After four years, Dr. Hilleman had so impressed his employer with his management skills that the company urged their young scientist to give up his lab and enter management. He turned them down flat and resigned to join an organization more compatible with his passion for science, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington. As chief of respiratory disease research, he was quick to act when delay might have cost lives.

In 1951, upon receiving notification of a flu epidemic at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, he requisitioned an Air Force cargo plane and flew with his team to the post to collect samples from flu victims for basic studies on influenza. His timely action did not contribute to influenza but led, instead, to his discovery of the adenoviruses, and he subsequently developed a vaccine that was near 100 percent effective in preventing the severe disease it caused in military recruits. A civilian version was licensed several years later. In charge of the Central Laboratory for Influenza Surveillance for the U.S. Military, he developed the technologies to study and to analyze the pathogenesis and epidemiology of influenza. With such capabilities, he was the first to detect and to sound the alert to the world public health community to prepare its defenses against what was to become the Asian Influenza Pandemic of 1957, one of the three pandemics of the 2000's.

Meanwhile, at Merck, a profound change was taking place. The 1950's were the beginning of the Modern Age of Vaccinology and after decades of creating drugs to treat diseases, Merck saw vaccines as a means of preventing them. In Dr. Hilleman, Merck saw not only a brilliant scientist but also a natural leader. In 1957 the Company announced the formation of a new Department of Virus and Cell Biology Research, to conduct basic research in infectious diseases and to develop vaccines, with Dr. Hilleman as its Director.

Merck's commitment to basic and applied research in infectious diseases was evident in the discoveries that flowed from the lab under Dr. Hilleman's stewardship. "In 1957 we perceived that live attenuated vaccines might be developed to help protect against measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox in children," he says. "But these were only dreams at the time."

In the 1960's those dreams became the realities which followed with the development of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. More vaccines followed, including vaccines against pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis A and hepatitis B.

Today, 19 years after his official retirement in 1984, Dr. Hilleman continues as an advisor and world statesman in infectious diseases, travelling, lecturing, and consulting. Most of his days are spent reviewing the world scientific literature in his areas of specialization. With the wisdom of long experience, he reduces the diverse and complex to useful knowledge, defining pathways to applicability, which is published in scientific journals.

The concepts he pioneered have yet to be fully exploited as they provide guidelines and precedents for the 21st century. He says that "vaccinology is still a field in which dreams can be turned into realities. There are plenty of uncertainties but if you stick to it, you can do what seems impossible."