Maurice Hilleman

Hilleman was born on 30 August 1919 in Miles City, Montana, to parents Edith and Robert Hilleman as the youngest of eight children. Neither his mother nor his twin sister survived the delivery. With eight children to raise on his own, Hilleman's father sent him and his older siblings to live on the nearby farm of Hilleman's aunt and uncle. Hilleman grew up during the Great Depression raising chickens and cattle and helping with the family business of making brooms and horseradish. In 1927, at the age of eight, Hilleman nearly died from diphtheria, a bacterial infection that causes fever, swelling of the throat and neck, and potentially fatal damage to the heart and nervous system. As a student, Hilleman regularly listened to science radio shows and read science textbooks. He also read Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species , despite disapproval from the local Lutheran minister. In 1937, Hilleman graduated from Custer County High School in Miles City and took a job at a local department store. Hilleman later said that though he was interested in science, he did not believe that he could afford to pay for a college education. However, in 1938, one of his older brothers told him that there were scholarships available at some Montana colleges and encouraged him to apply for them. Hilleman did so and received a full merit scholarship at Montana State College in Bozeman, Montana, where he enrolled later that year. At Montana State College, Hilleman double majored in chemistry and microbiology. One of his classmates, Menga Huffman, described Hilleman as solely dedicated to science and said that he often spent his Saturdays working in the chemistry lab rather than socializing. Hilleman graduated from Montana State College first in his class in 1941 and enrolled in a doctoral program studying microbiology at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Hilleman met and married Thelma Mason in 1943. While working at Walter Reed, Hilleman noticed that various strains of influenza, or flu viruses, can undergo changes from year to year, resulting in new flu strains. He noted that when only small changes to strains occurred, people's antibodies typically still recognized and provided immunity against the new flu strains. However, when larger changes occurred to flu strains, people's antibodies did not recognize the new strains and did not produce immunity against infection. Hilleman soon applied his theory of changes in flu virus strains. In April of 1957, an outbreak of avian flu occurred in Hong Kong, China, infecting nearly 250,000 people. Hilleman suspected that a major change to a strain of flu virus caused the outbreak. That change resulted in a new strain that few people's antibodies recognized, meaning most immune systems were unable to protect against the viral infection. At Walter Reed, Hilleman obtained blood samples infected with what was then called the Asian flu virus. Hilleman and his colleagues at Walter Reed worked fourteen-hour days for more than a week to isolate the virus and compare it to known antibodies from blood samples of different people groups from around the world. Hilleman discovered that almost none of the global blood samples had antibodies that recognized the Asian flu virus, meaning that almost no humans had protective immunity against the virus. Without any innate immunity or a vaccine, Hilleman predicted that when the Asian flu virus spread to the US, potentially more than a million people would die from infection. Hilleman sent samples of the isolated flu virus to several US vaccine manufactures to create a vaccine. The manufacturers grew the Asian flu virus in fertilized chicken eggs to weaken the strength of the virus, a process called attenuation, enough for use in vaccines. Growing the virus in chicken eggs caused to virus to adapt to chicken cells rather than human cells. As the virus adapted more to chicken cell biology, it beca