Amid the move to find a Covid-1 9 vaccine, Mark Honigsbaum picks his beloveds, including a fiction that has inspired generations of medical students and the story of Henrietta Lacks
As medical researchers race to find a inoculation for Covid-1 9, the histories of earlier medical breakthroughs give 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 1960 s scientists at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute began working on a inoculation for rubella( German measles) utilizing a contentious working method: germ-free cells from tissue extracted from an aborted foetus from a woman in Sweden. The Wistar cells were to revolutionise vaccine drawing, but ethical and political roadblocks convey it was 10 times before the institute was granted a patent, and it was not until 1978 that the Federal Drug Administration conceded the pharmaceutical fellowship Merck a licence for the vaccine in the US.
Read more: theguardian.com
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