This Man Has Saved Millions Of Lives Across The World For 50 Years, Thanks To His 40 Vaccines

Being a child before the 1960's was hard. It was really easy to contract a deadly disease as a kid, like the mumps or measles, and thousands if not millions died from them each year.

So all of you have a guy named Maurice Hilleman to thank for not suffering that anymore.

Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp

Born in 1919 in the US, Hilleman grew up in the height of the Great Depression. With a family not very well-off, he didn't have the privilege of a massive college fund and had to work for everything he got. He entered Montana State University of a full scholarship, eventually obtaining a bachelor's degree in microbiology and chemistry.? He also later earned a PhD in microbiology and chemistry in 1944 from the University of Chicago.

At the time, Hilleman decided that the best place for him was in the pharmaceutical industry, where he would be best positioned to conduct research and clinical trials. He was determined to develop a useful medical treatment that could be easily adopted by clinics around the US. And to that end, he joined the virus laboratories of E R Squibb & Sons in New Jersey

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There, he developed his first vaccines against Japanese B encephalitis, one that was sorely needed to immunise American troops fighting in the Pacific.

Over the years Maurice Hilleman was responsible for developing more than 40 vaccines, including for the measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae bacteria, chickenpox, and rubella. All told, he's credited with saving millions of lives and completely eradicating what were once deadly childhood diseases. It's estimated that his measles vaccine alone has prevented more than a million deaths.

Hilleman's daughter Kirsten (C), with her sister Jeryl Lynn (L) and Dr Robert Weibel (R) were the first to receive the mumps vaccine - Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp

However, you may have never even heard of him. That's because Hilleman's friends and colleagues say he wasn't one to claim recognition for his achievements. Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases once told the British Medical Journal that Hilleman's contributions were "the best kept secret among the lay public"

Hilleman's work was also famously anti-establishment. He preferred to pioneer new techniques rather than rely on established treatments. There's one famous incident in the industry where his daughter fell ill in 1963. Realising that she was showing all the symptoms of mumps, he swabbed the back of her throat and brought it back to his lab to grow a virus culture. By 1967, he had a vaccine for the disease. Of course, if he was living in modern times, the turnaround time would have been a lot slower, given the hoops medical researchers have to jump through in order to get their treatments tested and approved for human use.

Before succumbing to cancer in 2005, Hilleman received many honours, including a special lifetime achievement award from the World Health Organization. There was good reason for that too.

Take the measles for instance. In 1980, 2.6 million people died of it, with 545,000 succumbing to it in 1990. But by 2014, thanks to global vaccination programs using Hilleman's vaccine, the death toll had dropped to just 73,000.

When the mumps vaccine was introduced in the US in 1967, there were about 151,200 cases of the disease each year. By 2008, that average had dropped to about 265 a year. SImilarly, since the introduction of the Hepatitis A vaccine between 1991 to 1995, it's dropped infection rates in widely used countries by about 95 percent. Similarly, Hepatitis B infection rates in countries where the vaccine in freely available have dropped to less than 1 percent.

So when you're vaccinating your kid, don't forget that you have a guardian angel to thank, and all because he decided to do medical research instead of teaching students like his professors suggested.

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