The medical scientist who saved more lives in the 20th century than anyone else was Maurice Hilleman, who has died aged 85 from cancer in Philadelphia. Yet given his extraordinary achievements in developing vaccines, he was surprisingly little-known outside his field.
He created more than 40 human and animal vaccines, including those for diseases such as mumps, chickenpox, measles and german measles, as well as hepatitis A and B, and meningitis. At the pharmaceutical giant of Merck in New Jersey from 1957 to 1984, he and his team developed eight of the 14 vaccines now given routinely to young children in the developed world.
Hilleman was also the first scientist to discover how the influenza virus mutated, and is credited with almost single-handedly developing the vaccine that prevented a 1957 Asian flu outbreak from repeating the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, whichcaused 20 million deaths.
Hilleman always maintained the down-to-earth demeanour of the rural western state of Montana where he grew up. His early farm life there gave him a familiarity with chickens that he maintained all his life, and to which he owed some of his scientific success (chicken eggs are used to weaken live viruses and create vaccines).
His successful fight against the 1957 flu outbreak began in his basement office at Walter Reed military hospital in Washington in April of that year, when he saw an article in his newspaper about a flu outbreak in Hong Kong that had already affected 250,000 people. He recalled later that he said: "Son of a bitch, this is pandemic flu." He ordered his researchers to collect throat swabs from the Hong Kong victims, and with his team worked nine 14-hour days to isolate the virus. He found it to be a new strain of influenza against which Americans and others would have no resistance.
Immediately, he alerted public health authorities and gave virus samples to vaccine manufacturers. Then he insisted that chicken breeders spare the lives of cockerels that would otherwise be slaughtered, so they could fertilise the 40m eggs to be used in preparation of the new vaccine. As a result, the US death toll was 69,000.
In another episode, just before Hilleman was to leave on an overseas trip in 1963, his daughter of five, Jeryl Lynn, caught mumps. He wiped swabs in her throat and drove them to the laboratory freezer in the middle of the night. Later he used the specimens to produce a weak version of the virus that would immunise whoever took the vaccine. He named the strain after his daughter.
Hilleman was born in eastern Montana, but his mother and twin sister died during the birth, and Maurice and his seven older siblings were raised by relatives on a farm nearby. They tended cattle and chickens and made brooms to sell in town. After he left high school in 1937, he worked at the local JC Penney store.
He won a scholarship to Montana State University, then a University of Chicago fellowship for graduate study. His prize-winning thesis reported for the first time how to identify different strains of chlamydia, a micro-organism that causes venereal disease.
His first job was at ER Squibb & Sons, where he developed his first vaccine. It protected US troops from the Japanese B encephalitis virus while fighting during the second world war.
In 1948 he went to Walter Reed, where he began the influenza virus research. His long tenure at Merck was the pinnacle of his career. His measles vaccine has saved one million lives annually in the 40 years since its arrival, and his 1981 vaccine for hepatitis B, a primary cause of liver cancer, was the first vaccine to protect against a cancer.
His vaccines also prevented deafness, blindness and other disabilities among millions.
He is survived by his wife Lorraine and two daughters.
· Maurice Ralph Hilleman, medical scientist, born August 30 1919; died April 11 2005.
