Buy the paperback edition of The Vaccine Race by Meredith WadmanBuy the paperback edition of The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman

Wadman’s book, The Vaccine Race, was shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book PrizeThe Vaccine Race was also named a Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2017 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie 2018 Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The Guardian named it the second-best science book of 2017.

vaccinerace_03Meredith Wadman – Photo by Johnny Shryock for New America

Meredith Wadman has covered biomedical research politics from Washington for twenty years.

She is a reporter at Science and has written for NatureFortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Stanford and Columbia, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia and completed her medical degree as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford.
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The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that beat back German measles and other devastating diseases.

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a massive German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles and adenovirus.
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The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman book cover

 

A riveting tale of scientific infighting, clashing personalities, sketchy ethics, and the transformation of cell biology from a sleepy scientific backwater to a high-stakes arena where vast fortunes are made. Read More 

The Wall Street Journal, February 18 2017

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