Mission accomplished
Born and raised in wartime Shanxi, Eugene Wampler’s life came full circle when he returned to China to help develop a vaccine that would go on to save millions of lives, Zhao Xu reports in Harleysville, Pennsylvania.
In 1922, Elizabeth Wampler, a nurse who had been sent to work in China by the Christian church, had a photograph of her taken with Chinese twin brothers, children that she had either treated or helped to deliver, in southern Beijing.
Thirteen years later, Wampler, whose time in China extended far beyond that point, had two boys of her own — one born in 1933 in a village in Shanxi province, North China; the other in 1935 in a village 200 kilometers further southeast.
For the next 70 years, the Wampler family saw themselves riding a roller coaster through the everchanging landscape of China. They labored alongside local farmers, survived a Japanese bombing raid and an aircraft malfunction, witnessed the killing of their Chinese friends, endured the pain of separation and helped to improve the lives of millions of newborns.
“We are half-American, half-Chinese,” says Eugene Wampler, her younger son who returned to China half a century after his departure in 1949, to, as he adds, “close a circle first opened by mom”.
Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, Eugene Wampler, now 84, was closely involved in introducing to China the genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine — Recombivax HB — that would be used to protect a huge number of newborns from what was then China’s No 1 disease.
“By the end of the 1980s, 20 million babies were born in China each year, one in 10 of whom would become a chronic carrier of hepatitis B. And of those carriers, half would eventually die of liverrelated diseases,” he says.
A senior research fellow for Merck, an American pharmaceutical company, he was among the core members responsible for developing Recombivax HB — a drug that went on to prevent up to 120 million hepatitis B infections and 3 million related deaths in China.
“Previously, antigens for making the vaccine had been drawn from the blood of HB patients,” says Eugene Wampler.
“This was exactly the method used by the Chinese since the early 1980s, a method that not only carried an inbuilt risk for contamination — a hepatitis B carrier could also be an AIDS victim, for example — but also had proved severely inadequate when faced with China’s gigantic population that needed vaccination.”
According to him, by the late 1980s, the Chinese government was already approaching several pharmaceutical companies in the United States concerning the introduction of a new method by which the vaccine could be made with a genetically engineered strain of yeast.
China in 1989 had more than 180 million HB carriers.
At last, a contract was signed with Merck. The goal was for China, where people were generally reluctant about donating blood, to be self-sufficient in HB vaccine production, according to Eugene Wampler.
As one of the patent holders for the vaccine’s purification process, his professional background made him an ideal participant in the China project. But that was not all.
“I volunteered myself like crazy,” he says. “What I saw was a continuation of my own, and my family’s, China story.”
In 1914, an American doctor named Fred Wampler — Eugene Wampler’s uncle — traveled to China to open the first Western hospital in Shanxi. Five years later, he was joined by his younger brother Ernest Wampler, who also brought along his wife, Vida Wampler.
Partly responsible for the construction of a 121-kilometer long road designed to combat a local famine by facilitating transportation, Ernest Wampler had no choice but to leave China for the US in 1922, when his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis, grew more ill. She died later that year.
In 1928, Ernest Wampler married Elizabeth Baker, who had once worked at the hospital founded by Fred Wampler. The next year, the newlyweds returned to China, where she eventually gave birth to Joe and Eugene.
Both boys were given Chinese names: Wang Jinbao for Joe and Wang Jinde for Eugene. While the surname Wang was a phonetic twist on “Wampler”, the Chinese character jin is the abbreviation for “Shanxi”.
A short documentary written and narrated by Eugene Wampler last year includes black-and-white footage showing Ernest Wampler, shovel in hand, scattering chaff into the wind.
“Evangelism was the main purpose of my father’s work as a missionary. But growing up on a farm, he could easily relate to the local peasants, with whom he built a bridge of trust through agricultural work,” says Eugene Wampler.
The couple also sought to help improve local revenue by crossbreeding an indigenous stock of sheep with Merino sheep, which are prized for their wool. Today, one reminder of that history hangs in Eugene Wampler’s home in Lower Salford Township, Pennsylvania: a wool curtain woven by a local woman and given to the couple before their departure in the late 1930s.
On July 7, 1937, Japan invaded China. But Ernest Wampler and his wife were not deterred. A picture taken at the time shows Elizabeth Wampler, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, tending a severely burned bombing victim.
Life in the war zone was perilous. They had their first neardeath experience when, according to Eugene Wampler, a Japanese bomb landed in the courtyard of their family home.
“When she heard the approaching airplanes, my mother took me from my afternoon nap in the crib and carried me downstairs,” he recalls. “While we crouched between the downstairs windows, the bomb landed and the room was filled with dust and debris …”
“Then amid all that confusion, my mother heard a voice ask: ‘Mommy, am I dead?’ That was my brother, Joe.”
The nonstop bombing forced the family to move from town to town. For some time, they lived in caves that had been chiseled out of the mountainsides by locals. Many years later, the brothers would return there repeatedly to try and unlock childhood memories etched deep in their minds.
The family left China again in 1941, right before Japan attacked the Pearl Harbor. This was largely due to the Japanese killing of 13 Chinese members of the mission, whom they believed to have secretly aided the resistance forces. The Wamplers were spared because the US was not yet officially at war with Japan.
Although Ernest Wampler shuttled between the US and China during the rest of World War II, helping refugees in unoccupied areas, the family didn’t return as a whole until 1947. In September 1949, the boys boarded a ship to San Francisco from Shanghai, the city where they had spent what Eugene Wampler describes as “a coming-of-age time for a teenager”. The parents left later that year.
Looking back, Eugene Wampler says during the family’s stay in China, his father was often away for work and didn’t know whether the rest of the family was alive or not. The uncertainty ate away at him.
On one occasion, Elizabeth Wampler took a flight with her two sons from Shanghai to Beijing to join her husband, who was waiting anxiously for them at the airport.
“The plane’s engine got into trouble midair. In order to regain altitude, all the luggage — everything that people had to live on those days — had to be jettisoned,” recalls Eugene Wampler. “All our luggage also had to go, except for a small typewriter that my mom had. That was the only thing she was allowed to keep.”
The Wamplers must have spent a lot of time working on that typewriter. In 1945, in the wake of war, Ernest Wampler published his memoir, China Suffers, which chronicled his adventures during the country’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).
Unsurprisingly, “adventure” was also the word Eugene Wampler used to describe his involvement in the vaccine project: “We didn’t know if there would be success at the end of it, but luckily there was.”
Zhou Yongdong, who, fresh from university, worked under Eugene Wampler in the project’s quality control team, had firsthand experience of his work approach.
On one occasion, Zhou, after having sterilized some items of equipment destined to be used in the manufacturing process, was asked by his mentor to prove that they were indeed clean. “I almost got angry,” he recalls. “That had never happened before.”
“Today, I still have in mind this picture of him hunched over an old typewriter, typing out every word that we needed to know to uphold the standards he had insisted on,” Zhou says.
During his spare time, Eugene Wampler roamed around Beijing with his camera hunting for street food — dumplings bobbing up and down in bubbling water and handpulled noodles with spicy toppings were just two of his favorites.
“We loved to eat everything they sold,” says Teresa Wampler, his wife of 58 years. “Those visits were like a honeymoon.” Teresa Wampler had flown to Beijing several times during the project, where she occasionally taught English to her husband’s Chinese proteges, including Zhou.
Between 1987 and 2009, Eugene Wampler paid six “sentimental” visits to Shanxi, often with other family members: his wife, their children and grandchildren, and usually with Joe.
During one visit in 1997, the brothers located the cave house where the family had sought refuge after their own home was bombed by the Japanese. “The same windows and doors were there and the interior furnishings were also unchanged,” he says.
His photos from the time show the mottled wooden window frames, strung-together corn ears, large pottery water jars and the vaulted ceiling of the cave, and the clothesline that ran through it.
During another visit to Shanxi, they had their pictures taken with two Chinese men, standing in roughly the same positions as they did more than half a century ago, when someone — presumably, Ernest Wampler — had pressed the shutter on the four little friends heavily dressed against the forbidding winter of North China. All had grown in those intervening years, especially Eugene Wampler, who stood at over 6 feet tall.
The cave, as with the rest of China, would soon look different. While amazed by the country’s development, Eugene Wampler lamented the decline of the cave dwelling in the wake of China’s rapid urbanization, and how the area bore little resemblance to the place he once knew.
“We remembered life there as a family among ourselves,” says Eugene Wampler, who has filled his own house in Pennsylvania with mementos of his connections with China.
On one shelf, lies the book China
Suffers, which was dedicated in part to the 13 Chinese killed by the Japanese in 1940. Ernest Wampler died in 1978, followed by his wife in 1984, both at the age of 93.
Over the past year, Eugene Wampler has been fighting cancer and the disease has noticeably weakened him. But at every mention of a familiar name, or place, or food from China, he rises slightly from a chair, and his face lights up with a broad smile.
“What my mother had started as a nurse — helping women with difficult births — I was finishing with my role in the group looking for a solution for healthy babies in China,” he reflects.
Zhou says the introduction of the vaccine meant that over the following 25 years, an estimated 80 million to 120 million cases of hepatitis B infections were prevented in China, as well as an estimated 2 to 3 million cases of HBrelated deaths.
During their visit to Shanxi in 2003, the Wampler brothers encountered an old man playing checkers by the roadside. The brothers mentioned tentatively that they lived there some 70 years ago. The man stopped playing, looked at Eugene Wampler intently and said: “Wang Mu Shi.”
“That means Pastor Wang. And that was my father,” Eugene Wampler says.
What my mother had started as a nurse — helping women with difficult births — I was finishing with my role in the group looking for a solution for healthy babies in China.” Eugene Wampler, senior research fellow for American pharmaceutical company Merck Today, I still have in mind this picture of him hunched over an old typewriter, typing out every word that we needed to know to uphold the standards he had insisted on.” Zhou Yongdong, member of Eugene Wampler’s quality control team in the hepatitis B vaccine project