J Michael Lane
Leading figure in the eradication of smallpox around the world
JMICHAEL LANE, who has died aged 94, was one of the leading lights in the global fight to eradicate smallpox, as the director of America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) when the deadly virus was successfully rendered extinct in nature.
To start with, there was considerable scepticism as to whether a world without smallpox was attainable, given the virus’s prevalence in some of the poorest and most inaccessible nations on Earth. Justly feared since antiquity, smallpox was calculated to have killed 300 million people in the first half of the 20th century alone. Those who survived were often scarred for life, while a significant minority were blinded.
However, Lane had several reasons to be guardedly optimistic. First, Russia had guaranteed an adequate supply of the smallpox vaccine. Secondly, the US physician Dr William Foege had devised a strategy known as “ring vaccination”, which involved identifying and inoculating the close contacts of smallpox victims – thus containing any potential outbreak at its source.
All the CDC’S front-line workers had to demonstrate a strong biological response to vaccination before being deployed to individual hotspots. And the vaccine itself was both efficacious – a single dose conferred lasting immunity – and easily administered, allowing Lane and his colleagues to recruit an army of volunteers to their cause. “We trained illiterate villagers in five minutes,” he recalled.
Initially, the CDC’S work focused on containment efforts in west and westcentral Africa. As the years went by – and the data bore out the extraordinary success of the programmes – Lane became an expert on the side-effects of vaccination. By 1969 he was in a position to call for an end to routine smallpox vaccination in America, where the disease had become so scarce that the tiny risk of adverse sideeffects from the jab outweighed its benefits. On May 8 1980, the World Health Organisation declared smallpox eliminated from the Earth.
The son of Eileen O’connor and Alfred Lewis, John Michael (known as Mike) was born out of wedlock in Boston on February 14 1926. His mother subsequently
conferred the surname Lane on him and his older brother Roger. The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Mike attended Brunswick School. He received his medical degree from Harvard in 1961 and went on to study for a master’s in public health epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley.
He joined the Centers for Disease Control in 1963 and was assigned to the smallpox eradication bureau within a year – one of a small number of (as he put it) “young and naive and ambitious and optimistic” epidemiologists tasked with the disease’s defeat.
As the global campaign gathered momentum, Lane visited India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia to set up inoculation programmes. “When I went to Yugoslavia, the physicians there were amazed that I would go in to examine patients without a mask, gloves, or indeed anything,” he recalled. “Vaccination works!”
Later, when the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers ushered in an era of geopolitical instability, Lane wrote and spoke eloquently of the security threat posed by bioterrorism. Technological advances meant that “synthetic biology” – viruses created in a laboratory – posed a hitherto unimagined danger in the hands of malicious (or merely incompetent) actors. In 2017 Lane appealed to America’s public health officials to “keep funding the infrastructure, including good labs. Infectious diseases are not dead … Surveillance is vital, and needs improvement.”
Mike Lane’s marriage to Carolina Hernandez was dissolved and he married, secondly, Lila Summer. She survives him with a daughter from his first marriage.
J Michael Lane, born February 14 1926, died October 21 2020