An endless war: Us against killer viruses

The Vaccine Race Meredith Wadman Doubleday €28 ★★★★★

Only half a century ago the lives of many thousands of people were blighted by viruses that today are firmly under control. People lived in fear of diseases such as polio, hepatitis and rubella (commonly known as German measles), which can now be prevented by easily obtainable vaccines.

It’s something we take for granted, but as Meredith Wadman reminds us in this exhaustive account of the race to push back the boundaries of biological science, the immense difficulty and effort involved in producing effective vaccines leaves no excuse for complacency.

The scale of the achievement can be gauged by considering the 1964 German measles epidemic that swept the United States, affecting 20,000 newborn babies; 8,000 of these were born blind, and 4,000 both deaf and blind.

The first vaccines were developed in the 19th Century by the pioneering French scientist Louis Pasteur, but the focus of Wadman’s book is post-war America, where a combination of money, brains and institutional will made possible ground-breaking advances in microbiology. The central character is Leonard Hayflick, a scientific researcher who realised that vaccines made using human cells were far safer than existing methods, which

used cells harvested from monkeys.

The most contentious aspect of Hayflick’s work was that the cells he used were taken from an aborted human foetus. Not surprisingly, this has roused the ire of the powerful US pro-life lobby and turned the issue into a political football.

Wadman explains the complex science in methodical detail, which means that it’s heavy going for the general reader.

There is, though, plenty of human interest here, not least in the figure of Hayflick himself, a man who, for all his many flaws, possessed a vision and a dogged determination for which the rest of us should be supremely grateful.