Career
Upon completion of his PhD in 1944, Dr. Hilleman started working at a company called E.R. Squibb & Sons where he developed his first vaccine. The vaccine protected against Japanese encephalitis (JE) virus: the most common cause of encephalitis in the world. Infection with JE virus can lead to swelling of the brain and death. The vaccine was used to protect U.S. troops during World War II.
In 1949, Dr. Hilleman became the chief of respiratory diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. His project was to study influenza virus. During this time, Dr. Hilleman made discoveries critical to our understanding of influenza. First, he observed that the influenza virus underwent changes. Sometimes, the changes were small, but other times they could be dramatic. Later, the small changes became known as antigenic drift, and the sudden, major changes became known as antigenic shift. Antigenic shift can result in pandemics because almost no one in the world is immune to the significantly changed virus. Second, Dr. Hilleman realized in 1957, that an influenza pandemic had started in Hong Kong. He was the first person in history to predict a pandemic.
The result was that he created a vaccine before the virus arrived in the U.S. Close to 70,000 deaths in the U.S. occurred as a result of the pandemic. Public health officials estimate that the number of deaths in the U.S. could have reached 1 million had Dr. Hilleman’s vaccine not been available. For this effort, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal from the American military. Find out more about Dr. Hilleman’s accomplishments related to influenza by watching this clip from the film.
At the end of 1957, shortly after his daughter Jeryl Lynn was born, Dr. Hilleman began working for Merck & Co. to oversee their vaccine research and development. He remained at Merck for the rest of his career. Sadly, his wife, Thelma, died in 1963. Dr. Hilleman married Lorraine Witmer the following year. They had a daughter, Kirsten, in 1965. While at Merck, Dr. Hilleman developed vaccines to protect us from chickenpox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, pneumococcus, meningococcus, measles, mumps, and rubella. He was also the first person to combine viral vaccines when he created the MMR vaccine. With one shot, children could be protected against three diseases (measles, mumps, and rubella).
The story of the mumps vaccine is unique because Dr. Hilleman isolated the virus from his daughter, Jeryl Lynn, when she contracted mumps in 1963. By weakening the mumps virus he had obtained from Jeryl Lynn, he was able to make a safe and effective mumps vaccine. The same strain of mumps virus is used to make the mumps vaccine today. It is called the Jeryl Lynn strain. Find out more about this story in a clip from the film
When he created the hepatitis B vaccine, Dr. Hilleman became the first person to develop a vaccine against a virus that causes liver cancer in people. While at Merck, Dr. Hilleman worked with colleagues to create two versions of the hepatitis B vaccine. Watch this clip from the film to see why.
Read more about Dr. Maurice Hilleman on Wikipedia.