Maurice Hilleman, PhD

Prolific Vaccine Creator

Maurice Hilleman was born in Montana in 1919. He grew up on his uncle’s farm during the Great Depression, due to losing his mother and twin sister at birth. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and chemistry, he attended the University of Chicago on a fellowship. In 1944, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Chlamydia trachomatis, a bacterial infection believed to be the result of a viral infection at the time. He proved that the intracellular bacterium caused Chlamydia.

He joined the company now known as Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1944. While there, he worked on a vaccine against Japanese B encephalitis, work that brought him closer to the work needed by the United States military to maintain troop readiness. He worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research from 1948 to 1957. While there, he studied the antigenic drift and shifts seen in viruses. These drifts and shifts accounted for the periodic epidemics of viruses like influenza, as well as the less common (but more severe) pandemics. In 1957, after learning that a novel strain of influenza had emerged in Hong Kong, Dr. Hilleman and his team quickly worked on a vaccine. They produced about 40 million vaccine doses, mitigating the impacts of that influenza epidemic.

In 1957, Maurice Hilleman joined Merck & Co. in Pennsylvania, and it is there where his contributions really took off. In his 47 years at Merck, Dr. Hilleman led and worked on teams that produced vaccines still in use today, like the mumps vaccine. In one famous anecdote from this time there, Dr. Hilleman saw his daughter, Jeryl Lynn, showed the signs and symptoms of mumps. He swabbed her throat and used that mumps virus to grow the laboratory strain still used in 2022 for the mumps component of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine in the United States and other parts of the world.

By the time he died in Philadelphia in 2005, at 85 years of age, Dr. Hilleman was responsible for eight vaccines on the United States schedule of recommended childhood vaccinations: measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria. The film “Hilleman: A Perilous Quest to Save the World’s Children” tells his life story in more detail and is available here:  

Sources

• Newman L. Maurice Hilleman. BMJ. 2005;330(7498):1028.
• Tulchinsky TH. Maurice Hilleman: Creator of Vaccines That Changed the World. Case Studies in Public Health. 2018;443-470. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-804571-8.00003-2