In _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_, the famous first lieutenant Spock airily quips to Dr. McCoy that “as a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.” At the end of the film, the Vulcan sacrifices his life to prevent the destruction of the entire crew, because “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.
Recent events have painfully demonstrated how easily destruction can wreak its way through a civilization. However, history has also shown that some individuals have made a disproportionally enormous influence in holding people together. And the most important person that you may have never heard of in this category is the vaccinologist shown here, Maurice Hilleman.
Maurice (d. 2005 age 85) was a relentless workaholic who was responsible for the development of over 40 vaccines. Born into a large family, Hilleman’s mother died when he was an infant. His family’s business was farming, and but for an older brother’s financial contributions, he would have been unable to attend college. Good thing for all of us that he did, because he eventually developed vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, chickenpox, and a vicious flu strain that had threatened to become a pandemic the likes of which we are experiencing today.
Maurice looked for every opportunity to create vaccines – when his daughter Jeryl Lynn got the mumps, he cultured some of the virus from her throat and used it to make the vaccine. In 1957 when a flu strain emerged out of Hong Kong, he used his childhood knowledge of chicken farming to commandeer eggs across American farms for use in the creation and distribution of the vaccine he succeeded in developing in time to siphon off the flu’s death toll.
Gone now for fifteen years, it is estimated that Maurice Hilleman is still saving eight million lives a year with the vaccines that he created. Entropy does not always work the way you think it will — Maurice’s sacrifice of a lifetime of work was the opposite of destruction.
Source(s): @microbe.tv in reading for this post I found that Alan Dove from TWiV wrote an article I used!
