Amid the rush to find a Covid-19 vaccine, Mark Honigsbaum picks his favourites, including a novel that has inspired generations of medical students and the story of Henrietta Lacks
As medical researchers rush to find a vaccine for Covid-19, the stories of earlier medical breakthroughs offer hope, but also reasons to be cautious about the timescale and effectiveness of any discovery.
In The Vaccine Race, Meredith Waldman describes how in the early 1960s scientists at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute began working on a vaccine for rubella (German measles) using a controversial new method: germ-free cells from tissue extracted from an aborted foetus from a woman in Sweden. The Wistar cells were to revolutionise vaccine making, but ethical and political roadblocks meant it was 10 years before the institute was granted a patent, and it was not until 1978 that the Federal Drug Administration granted the pharmaceutical company Merck a licence for the vaccine in the US.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/34OXWnK
