[June 26th marks the 300th anniversary of Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston’s first inoculations against the raging smallpox epidemic. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Boylston and other vaccine figures and histories, leading up to Friday’s post on the Covid vaccine!]
On two types of
challenging collective histories we can better remember through the story of
the “Father
of Modern Vaccines” (well, one of them anyway—in researching this post I
learned that Maurice
Hilleman is known by that nickname as well).
In many ways,
John Franklin Enders’ story is profoundly inspiring, and an example of how a
life of privilege can still help produce important collective progress. Enders’
father John Ostrom
Enders (1869-1958) was the CEO of Hartford National Bank as well as a civic
leader and Connecticut State Representative, and upon his death in 1958 would
leave his son $19 million; that son, John Franklin Enders (1897-1985), attended
Yale University and seemed predetermined for a similarly privileged life. Yet
he took a leave of absence from Yale to volunteer for the World War I US Army
Air Corps in 1918 (he did finish his college education upon the war’s end), and
that moment foreshadowed a life of communal service, both through his groundbreaking
work in immunology
at Children’s Hospital Boston and (especially) through his pioneering, Nobel
Prize-winning contributions to the 20th century development of
vaccines, especially the measles
vaccine but also in the field more broadly (leading to that aforementioned nickname).
The fact that
Enders isn’t better known (at least outside of the medical and scientific
communities) is a reflection of one of the challenging histories I want to
highlight in this post: our tendency to remember individual
“inventors” or pioneers, often those who build on the
work of others, rather than the more collective histories that truly
constitute innovation and progress. I’ll have more to say about this in
tomorrow’s post, but that trend seems clearly to be the case when it comes to
the polio vaccine; Jonas Salk was indeed one of the scientists working toward
that vaccine, but his work built on that of many others, including a well-established
team featuring Enders and his fellow virologists Thomas
Huckle Weller and Frederick
Chapman Robbins. The trio’s work won them the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine, so it’s not as if it and they weren’t acknowledged; but since Salk
had publicly announced his successful development of a polio vaccine a year
earlier, he became the famous face and name forever (at least to this point) associated
with the vaccine.
History is damn
complicated, however (that could really be the slogan for this blog), and the
other largely forgotten, challenging history I want to highlight puts Enders in
a far worse light. In the same year that Enders won that Nobel, he and his
colleague Thomas
C. Peebles isolated the measles virus in an 11 year old patient, and Enders
began working on a vaccine for that highly
contagious childhood illness (on which more later in the week as well). Such
a vaccine was announced by the New York Times in September 1961,
and Enders generously wrote to the paper to downplay his own role and acknowledge
the contributions of colleagues. Which is all well and good, but there was another
community who contributed to that process: the 1500 mentally
disabled New York children on whom Enders and his colleagues performed experimental
trials. As that complex hyperlinked newsletter details, at least some of those
children, like 1966-1967 Poster
Child Kim Fisher, had been affected by measles, making their role in the
vaccine’s development symbolically significant to be sure. But it’s still quite
difficult to say how much a voice these children had in their own role in these
medical experiments, experiments that had no certainty of a positive outcome
for them. Just one more layer to the complex histories of the Father of Modern
Vaccines.
Next
VaccineStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Vaccine histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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