Please silence your devices your feedback is valuable surveys are available in by submitting one you can be entered into the drawing for a visa a gift card yawp there will be signing copies of her book after the presentation this is a freak event but it does help be a stability by a book the more you buy them or theyll want to send all others your to support us. Therefor to benefit the local economyecon so if you enjoy the of program please buy a book here today i am very pleased to introduce a doctor Meredith Wadman with an impressive career receivediology her ph. D. From stanford and an Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and a degree in journalism at columbia writing for the New York Times and Washington Post and currently a staff writer as an epidemiologist in training our is exciting to read her book the vaccine race the cdc considers vaccinations and number one Public Health achievement of the 20thcentury that they have saved him millions of lives with the smallpox has been eradicated in the surge of other diseases like polio or chickenpox are a thing of the past not only about great achievements of Public Health paul so the men and women and children who help to make these vaccines possible for those so contemporary interviews of the key players of those individuals are kept alive on played in public of the pages. Dr. Wadman does not shy away from vaccine experiments the vaccine race reminds us we learn from the past so the story written in the future is more ethically grounded so it is not just for the nerd but those interested in American History and politics. Were very lucky dr. Wadman is here with us today. [applause] [inaudible conversations] thanks to the of gas and also to the gaithersburg book festival organizers said cannot think of a better way to spend a saturday them with those who love to read and write. Was born between medical family my mother was a Public Health nurse my father was a doctor we grew up with the idea that vaccinations were good and important but not until as ad medical student on a pediatrics rotation during the apartheid era that really came home and a visceral way how lucky we were to be protected by these vaccines. Crowd, to be overcrowded underfunded costabile hospital and typically by the time kids got there they were very sick and malnourished and with the lack of vaccinations in combination that is a devastating cycle that willas cripple the kids to invading their brains or loans withth an ammonia. This is not advancing. This toddler had just died for lack of the 0. 29 back seen so i went on to realize my calling would be a writer and aicher great a article about the hospital and that was the moment of truth for me that i thought i will goo to journalism and be a writer and i am lucky enough to do that over 20 years. This is like going from the red sox to the yankees but we are one big happy family. So why write the book called the vaccine race . There is a lot of things i will touch on three major points the cells are called wi38 that sells the race was to get the of rubella vaccine in the 60s soul also talk about those that were used to lower abused to get new therapies so how did i get started began with another book with the events with a 31 yearold largely illiterate and the africanamerican woman dying of Cervical Cancer that that became ubiquitous and hugely important to medical research and the author of the of book spends a lot of time to examine the impact and i could not put it down of so i couple of years later i a came across the letter from Science Magazine that identifies himself as a scientist california who said that the cells were getting all the attention but i had some in 1962 from the aborted fetus that was for hundreds of millions of people that i got into a huge intellectual property fight with the nih about who all those cells and the questions that are still unanswered today that letter leap off the page very soon after he was 84 at the time to this very day he is still going strong after his 90th birthday that i phoned him and i said it sells there is the untold story and he said is there ever. O have a c so shortly thereafter i had a College Reunion and i was able to visit him to talk about of the wi38 cells from the beginning he took me down memory lane of an elegant brownstones on the pennsylvania campus it was a creepy mausoleum of 19th century american anatomy with a horrible anatomical specimens for croatia and at a time the man in the middleec was recruited to give the institute a new life he was a largerthanlife character a polish immigrant escaping from hitler in the nick of time fled with his family to the states he could discuss agrology and loved wine and women in definitely looked on american scientists to be just a bit to colonial so when he hired a working class philadelphia in who brought himself up in and abroad as well as from medical microbiology he looked on him as a technician for experiments for other outstanding virologist all over the world. Well he was very ambitious and not about to be made a secondclass citizen or a household servant. So he began to get fetuss from abortions conducted across the street at the hospital of the university of pennsylvania. In every that was criminal in every state in this era in pennsylvania there is not even the exception do to save the life of the mother you could get 10 years of auth labor however authorities were book aside from Major Medical centersed where they could do a medical Therapeutic Abortion justified by doctors and they would tolerate that so that as though theyve got the flow of fetuss every few months and roadies fetus is in a lab dish so if you should do that and they should grow forever they were a moral and if they died it was a scrap of the scientist sir the nutritious to nourished of seouls was deficient so on they kept dying first the cells from the first fetus started to get decrepit then the next he thought he was screwing up and doing all types of experiments what was he doing wrong . You can see on the of left is healthy cells from the lungs and on the right to their old and disorganized and decrepit in the end stages of life. Why . He finally saw what decades of scientists had not seen that cells are as marshall provided they are normal. Cancer cells by definition will grow forever but these were from healthy normal fetuses dying in a published a paper that said as much and took a lot of flak but that made hayfleck name and they will note that 50 cell divisions that they will go through before they will die if they are normal. So immediately there was tremendous interest they wanted to get a hold of the of fetal cells in the extent that normal biology of aging. Rested the n. I. H. Was equally t interested because they wanted to find scientists to look into the cells but all of those had died so what he would do the nih funded than to start developing new fetal cells. A lot of money came from these nih to a contract of hayfleck 120,000 per year in the 60s. There was a tiny clause if you finish the contract of the materials developed under that become the property of the federal government and its hours to keep and you will hand them back. Hayfleck also had an interest to develop a new line for vaccines and having to do with the rhesus monkey you will recall 1955 the polio vaccine was introduced the great victory of the era but to solve that that was from the monkey kidney cells in that became apparent through the 50s that the rhesus monkey kidney cells was a silent virus sent tens of millions of children were vaccinated with assault vaccine and 70s were in the vaccine sold 30 million children were exposed to the monkey virus that penetrated the vaccine but they thought it was killed by the sermaldehyde the same thought to kill the of the rest of the regulators did not worry now virus we know they are a piece of genetic material. They dont eat or drink or sleep they must invade the cells to reproduce so a virus will invade or hijack the machinery or make copies of itself that is how viruses replicate so to make a viral vaccines you need the cells that is the use ofus the monkey kidney cells. So on the left the unsung heroine came from the town of less than 200 and West Virginia working her way from a ph. D. In cincinnati realizing the rhesus monkey kidney cells heartache a particular monkey virus that caused a fatal cancer in her laboratory hamster she alerted her bosses was silenced and devoted and put w to work in the supply room and she just put up with the punishment. The only newspaper that paid attention was the National Enquirer which in effect got the story right. Yes there was a polio vaccine coverup and there was this virus in the fall vaccine nobody knew in the long term so was very clear cause cancer in the hamsters and soon it you scrape the cheek it could so they move to another species Going Forward but hayfleck looked at this and thought what we get the souls from one clean normal fetus to multiplied in the lab then we can use them and know they are safe and dispense with importing the monkeys and slaughtering them. Rce of so hayfleck needed the source of the aborted fetus to get the medical history the surgeons at the university did not care about his work was a paid in the but the he understood its importanceonnection disconnections he could contact the institute in stockholm where abortions were legal to obtain a the fetus from the mother ofof several Young Children and husband was not to abuse and was out of town and not much help and an alcoholic with a criminal record she could not read raise another child that was legal but not easy many would not perform them and by the time she swund the swedish gynecologist to agree to perform the abortion issue was four months pregnant now im trying to race ahead after this goes into effectchesg was 8 inches long wrapped in a cloth the longs were dissected and flown to philadelphia where hayfleckum was waiting in the summer ofhe , 1962 social change was coming many events were of what so hayfleck spent the summer to riding of wi38 cells from mrs. X pds and 8 created 800 each had to retrieve million souls each annual had the potential to divide another 40 times seven you realize between one little bottle of 10 million cells will produce 22 tons when fully expanded so he created a supply that was infinite especially if you realize if you freeze them that ampule one year or one decade later they will begin dividing again and will remember how many times they divided then will continue up through 50 divisions roughly so they still use these cells today from the summer of 62. D about te hayfleck was excited doing lab test it was clear that these were clean and safe and National Back to interview mrs. X to make sure that the family was free of disease this is how she learned the fetus was taken. She made it clear there was no problems but then ran into the wrong man rob murray. Very smart harvard educated physician and an expert in virology but he was so specific of u. S. Medical corps with a terrible accident of the yellow fever vaccine the tens of thousands of military menth were infected with hepatitissb h c that mistakenly infected the yellow fever vaccine so put the fear of god in marie so 13 years later when this is ruled out he was second in command in the Vaccine Safety Division were a Company Called cutter laboratories had the liveir poliovirus 192 people were paralyzed they have the recall it was a terrible situation there went to the secretary of health and Human Services fired so he moved into his bosss position and became the chief of vaccine regulator for the entire United States. He was in the nih becauseonly lr that is or regulation resided in the government. He kept his own counsel was slow to make decisions, very conservative and did not want to make changes unless he was forced to serve you looked at hayfleck and was afraid they were going to cause cancer even European Countries and Clinical Trials were yet rushing to use this but hayfleck cells were stymied. Ne in 19 so in 1964 a rebel of epidemic descended on the United States also known as german measles it is like a fever or you might not know you are infected however if of a pregnant woman gets it it is devastating on the fetus and might seek a virus bezique a virus rubella double hit nearly every fetus in the first trimester see you can imagine with no vaccine available women were terrified by it some more than 20,000 babies were born blind or deaf or intellectually disabled or the shrunken heads like the zika virus babies at least 5,000 shows do terminate they could not be sure so it was very scary. Picture those are pictures of then rubella virus particles moving between the cells so then it affects virtually every fetal organ one of the outcomes is cataracts this is steven who was born during this epidemic blind and deaf and of heart defects. And as a selfmade mangr growing up in the bronx medical working his way through medical school was almost shut down because he was jewish earned a scholarship that meant the Medical Center could not turn himho down for medical school he had his heart set to emulate the institute who was a polio vaccine pioneer in he decided he would do something with this epidemic he was already working in britain where the epidemic hit a year earlier said he returned to New Philadelphia and soon became known as the only doctor in philadelphia who could run a blood test to tell a pregnant woman if she was infected. The blood then couples would say it asked fake a pleased if the blood test was positive andare a if they chose to abort he would say could i please have the fetus im trying to locate those cells so he received 31 fetuss in a calendar year 1964 fetus number 27 that he captured the rebel a virus of those wi38 cells that is a sense of the anxiety that the women experienced so being against big competition many Major Drug Companies that every woman of childbearing age would want the vaccineld plus probably regulators wouldnt recommend it for Young Children to not expose their mothers smithkline french also another very sophisticated Belgian Company so they are very stubborn and determined so when he developed the vaccine he found a powerless institutionalized population to go to the archbishop of philadelphia that operated a orphanage called st. Vincents whole for children to test the vaccine on the toddlers. I will pause to read a little bit from the book. And im projecting okay . Saints this is home for children was made of red brick and three stories tall taking up most of the city block the rings were marked in those words with the Roman Catholic archdiocese owned and operated the home well called them an orphanage the ball of parents of the kids that live there were dead they were destitute or sick or in jail summer and married women who forced to give upup their children for adoptional fm there was no Maternity Hospital for the unwed mothers and when the babies were born if not adopted in the first year they were passed to the orphanage many were black or mixedrace. So the good those that played and bathed with those toddlers in the Assembly Line fashion theyre all so to adoptive stray dogs in a Maintenance Man but the nuns began to the missionary in war though white habits. Evidence simple single rooms gro and worship in a small chapel on the ground floor. It was a spartan place with no doors on the bathrooms the nuns tried to make up in love with day lacked in physical warmth to make sure the kids were out every day on the playground and read to them as storytelling. One sister in her late 20s knew that they were children and there were so many so the level of care and attention than she could not p provide the data at a foster family arrived to take one play away to take one boy away or losing a sister on the face of a deaf girl that the present that the archbishop handed to her at the annual Christmas Party in f was a decoration in an empty box so the family plots gotgr the green light for the rubella vaccine for those living at st. Vincents in his letter requesting permission he did not explain he captured the vaccine virus from one aborted fever it reducing garner from another as he was very antiabortion. In 1973 he recalled thepr Supreme Court decision in roe v wade the unspeakable tragedy for the nation that set in motion events that unspeakable to contemplate. Ad. 1964 but he gave the steady a goahead. So i will stop there. I thought this was 50 minutes but now it is 40. So i will move on quickly. Callyp so basically to be outgunnedwon with that political favoritism won approval for their rubella vaccine the key round every six to seven years so there was a tremendous weight to get it before 70 when the next epidemic was expected and in 69 the regulators approved the pharmaceutical whole manufacture vaccines but it emerged because of one womananoa the first chairwoman ofom pediatrics at yale who paid close attention to the studies that the vaccine was better to do generate better levels of antibodies dorothy did not take no for an answer was that the chief of vaccine making to live in fear and trepidation and shed told them in no Uncertain Terms you have the inferior vaccine he was profane side cannot tell you what he told her but to this day as of 1979 with the mmi areru vaccine that merck manufactured that has the rubella vaccine in and to this day it is put into american babies that are injected with it to each year and also exported to 40 other countries no doubt it has prevented tens of millions of abortions and fetal abnormalities to this day. The first vaccine made was the wi38 cells that arrived was finally approved by u. S. Regulators in 1972 because m