- Person
- Stanley Plotkin
- Lived
- b. 1932
- Field
- Vaccines
- From
- American
The story
Rubella, or German measles, is usually a mild illness for children. But when a woman catches it early in pregnancy the virus can infect her baby, causing miscarriage, stillbirth or congenital rubella syndrome, which can bring deafness, blindness, heart defects and intellectual disability. In the United States epidemic of 1964 and 1965 there were about 12.5 million cases, roughly 11,000 pregnancy losses, 2,100 newborn deaths and 20,000 babies born with congenital rubella syndrome.
Stanley Plotkin, a young physician born in New York in 1932 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from England, had seen the first cases of the European epidemic while working at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London in 1963. Back at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia he set out to make a vaccine. He isolated the virus, named his strain RA 27/3, and weakened it by growing it repeatedly at low temperature in WI-38, a strain of normal human cells developed by his Wistar colleagues Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead. Because these cells could be checked for contaminating viruses, the vaccine was clean and its side effects were minor.
At a 1968 conference at the National Institutes of Health, Plotkin’s was the only candidate vaccine made in human cells, and the polio pioneer Albert Sabin questioned its safety. Plotkin argued his case and in time won Sabin over. The vaccine was ready in 1969 and was adopted first in Europe. Because RA 27/3 gave stronger immunity with fewer reactions than the strain first used in the United States, it was licensed there in January 1979 and became the rubella component of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, MMR II.
Since then RA 27/3 has been given to hundreds of millions of children around the world as part of MMR vaccination. In April 2015 the Pan American Health Organization declared the Americas the first region in the world to be free of endemic rubella, the result of a 15-year campaign of MMR vaccination across the Western Hemisphere, and rubella has also been eliminated in more than half of European countries.
Why it matters
Children vaccinated with MMR today carry Plotkin’s rubella strain, which protects the next generation of babies from deafness, blindness and heart defects caused by rubella before birth.
About Stanley Plotkin
New York-born physician who developed the RA 27/3 rubella vaccine used around the world, helped create rabies and rotavirus vaccines, and wrote the field’s standard textbook.
Sources
- Stanley Plotkin Wikipedia
- Stanley Alan Plotkin (1932– ) The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
- Stanley A. Plotkin, MD History of Vaccines
- Americas region is declared the world’s first to eliminate rubella Pan American Health Organization
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.