Germ warfare Leonard Hayflicks use of human cells helped pave the way to a revolution in public health. Photograph: Alamy

In March 1968, biologist Leonard Hayflick visited the basement of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia. He was seeking a set of 375 vials, each bearing the code WI-38. Once found, he placed them in a nitrogen-cooled container and then hid them in a friends house. He informed no one at Wistar, his former employer, of his actions.

A few days later, Hayflick transported the vials to Stanford University, where he had just been made professor of medical microbiology. There he started to sell them to drug companies.

Each vial contained several millioncells grown from a single aborted human foetus. Infected with rubella, polio, rabies, hepatitis A and other viruses, the WI-38 cells would act as hosts for growing these viruses so they could be used as the basis of vaccines, Hayflick argued. Crucially, they would be free of contaminants that had recently been found in vaccines made from viruses grown in animal cells not an issue for his pristine foetal cells.

A gifted experimenter, Hayflick had created the WI-38s (which stands for Wistar Institute sample 38) in 1962. They were the worlds first line of normal, noncancerous human cells and held fantastic promise. However, they were not Hayflicks property. They belonged to the Wistar Institute, and their removal and subsequent sale for profit left him wide open to charges of theft. In the end, he only narrowly avoided prosecution. So why did the biologist take such extraordinary action?

Meredith Wadman is clear about the source ofHayflicks woes. He was working under duress, reined back by obdurate, ultra-conservative, self-protective vaccine regulators who were preventing him from using his cells for vaccine work. Hence his decision to sell them on the quiet to pharmaceuticals companies.

The move would haunt Hayflick for the rest of his life. He was hounded from office and never received the accolades he deserved for deriving his cells (which are still used by vaccine makers today). It took a decade of procrastination before US regulators capitulated and approved his cells for vaccine development. (Europe was far quicker off the mark.) Since then, more than 6bn vaccine doses based on his cells have protected the west against rubella, rabies, chicken pox, and other lethal or debilitating illnesses.

Hayflick achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble

In the case of rubella, which can cause severe foetal damage in pregnant women, the vaccine halted infections and stopped mothers seeking abortions as they had done widely in the past after finding themselves infected in early pregnancy. Thus a vaccine itself based on aborted foetal tissue had a far greater pro-life effect than all the efforts of anti-abortion religiousactivists.

It is an extraordinary story and Wadman is to be congratulated, not just for uncovering it but for relaying it in such a pacy, stimulating manner. This is a first-class piece of science writing that does considerable justice to Hayflick, a character who achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble.

For long periods in his later life, Hayflick, a family man, was cold-shouldered by US academia and he had to scrabble for work in the wake of his raid on Wistars freezers. In a fair world, he should have been heading departments of leading researchers although today, aged 86, he does find himself at least partially rehabilitated, having served as an adviser to several biotech companies and authored some well-received books.

Much of this restoration concerns the crucial role he played in the field of ageing research, for in developing his WI-38 cells, Hayflick discovered an intriguing fact. There was an upper limit for the number of times each of his cells would divide known today as the Hayflick limit. Previously, scientists thought that cells in a culture could continue to divide for ever. The existence of an upper limit gave scientists a means to explore cellular senescence, by homing in on the mechanism that regulates thelimiting of cell division and so creating a flourishing field that today offers important insights into cancer and ageing.

More to the point, Hayflicks relentless campaigning for the right to use human cells instead of animal cells to make vaccines helped speed up a revolution in public health in the west, though few thanked him at the time. Nevertheless, he played a key role in the victory in the war against viral diseases such as rubella and polio, an achievement that freed us from truly terrible scourges.

This point is worth recalling whensome individuals, including Donald Trump, openly question theworth and effectiveness of vaccines. For them, Alan Shaw, a former vaccine researcher, has a perfect response quoted by Wadman.Developing vaccines is probably one of the most productive things you can do, simply because if you succeed in getting one made, you watch a disease disappear.

The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman is published by Doubleday (20). To order a copy for 16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses by Meredith Wadman review - The Guardian