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.
Waldman’s book has uncanny parallels with the Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This bestseller shows how the cervical cancer cells harvested in 1951 from an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, gave rise to the immortal HeLa cell line. Lacks’s cells, which were taken without her consent, were instrumental in the development of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine and other important therapies, but to this day Lacks’s family has not received compensation for her contribution to medical research.
Few breakthroughs can be more important than James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins’s Nobel prize-winning discovery of the helical structure of DNA – a story told in Watson’s hugely popular but partial 1968 memoir The Double Helix. As Brenda Maddox explains in Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, it was Franklin’s photograph of the molecule, shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge, that confirmed their intuition. Feminist scholars have sought to portray Franklin, who died in 1958 and who was overlooked for the 1962 Nobel prize, as the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”. However, in her remarkable book based on Franklin’s personal correspondence, Maddox shows Franklin maintained a close friendship with Watson and Crick until her death.
You may not have heard of monoclonal antibodies, or Mabs. But as Lara Marks explains in The Lock and Key of Medicine, these microscopic protein molecules, discovered in the mid-70s in the same Cambridge laboratory where Watson and Crick worked on DNA, quietly affect almost every aspect of our lives and have at least as great a claim to have revolutionised medicine. The applications of Mabs include organ transplantation, recombinant interferon and insulin, and personalised drug therapies such as Herceptin.
Generations of medical students have been inspired to go into research by Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel Arrowsmith. Lewis teamed up with the science writer Paul de Kruif to write this tale of a small-town boy, Martin Arrowsmith, who rises to the pinnacle of medical science by discovering a phage therapy for plague. The prose is a little overwrought for modern tastes, but the novel was a runaway bestseller and is still worth reading for its account of the commercial pressures and professional rivalries endemic to science. Like his hero, who after treating plague on a remote Caribbean island turns down an offer to head up his old laboratory in New York, Lewis was averse to professional plaudits. In 1926 he declined the Pulitzer prize for fiction, claiming he had no desire to “tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee”. A Nobel prize could be at stake for the discovery of a vaccine for Covid-19, but present-day medical researchers might wish to bear Lewis’s scepticism in mind.
• The Pandemic Century by Mark Honigsbaum is published by WH Allen (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
