A Bronx boyhood and two books
Stanley Alan Plotkin was born in New York City on May 12, 1932, the son of Lee and Joseph Plotkin, Jewish parents who had emigrated to the United States from England. He grew up in the city with a younger sister, Brenda, and went to the Bronx High School of Science, the public magnet school that has produced an unusual number of scientists, graduating in 1948.
At fifteen he read two books that decided his life. One was Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, a popular history of the scientists who first tracked down the germs behind infectious diseases. The other was Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith, about a young doctor who turns to medical research and fights an epidemic. Plotkin has said many times that Arrowsmith is the reason he chose a career in vaccines; decades later he wrote about the book’s influence on him in an essay he titled, with a doctor’s humour, “The late sequelae of Arrowsmith.”
From medical school to the disease detectives
Plotkin earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University in 1952 and his medical degree at the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn in 1956, where he worked in the laboratory of Robert Austrian. After a pediatric internship at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, he wanted to join the Air Force to learn to fly. Instead he joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the U.S. Public Health Service, the young corps of disease detectives run by what is now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (He did learn to fly in the end, at the age of 74.)
The service posted him to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia to study anthrax among mill workers, under the virologist Hilary Koprowski, who was then becoming Wistar’s director. Plotkin also joined Koprowski’s work on oral polio vaccines, including field testing in what was then the Belgian Congo. He stayed connected to Wistar for more than three decades, as a member of its research faculty from 1960 to 1991, while training in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and spending a formative year, 1962 to 1963, at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, in London.
The epidemic that harmed the unborn
Rubella, sometimes called German measles, is usually a mild illness in children: a rash, a little fever, and it is gone. But when a woman catches it early in pregnancy, the virus can cross into the developing baby and cause miscarriage, stillbirth or congenital rubella syndrome, a cluster of lifelong disabilities that can include deafness, blindness, heart defects and intellectual disability.
In London in the spring of 1963, working with the pediatrician Alistair Dudgeon, Plotkin saw the first cases of a rubella epidemic sweeping Europe. It reached the United States in 1964 and 1965, and it was a catastrophe. According to the History of Vaccines project of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 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. Back at Wistar, Plotkin asked to work on rubella, and he set out to make a vaccine that would protect future mothers and their babies.
RA 27/3: a better rubella vaccine
Plotkin isolated the virus from fetal tissue and named his strain RA 27/3: rubella abortus, the 27th specimen, third tissue explant. To weaken it so that it would immunise without causing disease, he applied what he had learned from polio work, growing the virus repeatedly at low temperature in WI-38 cells, a strain of normal human cells derived from fetal tissue that his Wistar colleagues Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead had developed. Unlike the animal cells used by competing laboratories, WI-38 cells could be checked for contaminating viruses, and the vaccine produced in them was clean and caused only minor side effects.
At a 1968 conference at the National Institutes of Health, four candidate rubella vaccines were compared. Plotkin’s was the only one made in human cells, the others having been grown in cells from ducks, dogs and rabbits. The great polio researcher Albert Sabin objected, worried that human cells might carry hidden cancer-causing viruses. Plotkin argued that the evidence did not support that fear, and in time Sabin came round. Plotkin’s vaccine was completed in 1969 and was adopted first in Europe. In the United States, the drug company Merck initially used a different strain, HPV-77, licensed in 1969; but the RA 27/3 strain produced stronger immunity with fewer reactions, and in January 1979 it was licensed in the United States and replaced the older strain in Merck’s measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, MMR II.
RA 27/3 has been the rubella component of MMR vaccines around the world ever since. Its use in human fetal cell lines also made it the subject of moral debate, including objections from religious groups; Plotkin has defended the choice on scientific grounds and has noted wryly that critics seemed to think he was the only one who had sinned.
Careful follow-up by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found no cases of congenital rubella syndrome among babies whose mothers had been vaccinated by mistake while pregnant, reassuring doctors that the vaccine was safe even in that worst case.
Rabies, rotavirus and more
Plotkin used the same WI-38 cells for a second life-saving project. With Koprowski and Tadeusz Wiktor at Wistar, he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s a human diploid cell rabies vaccine, licensed in the United States from 1980. Older rabies vaccines, made in animal nerve tissue, were painful and could cause serious neurological reactions; the new vaccine was far safer and could be given both before exposure and after a bite, preventing infection in almost all cases when used properly.
At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he directed infectious diseases from 1972 to 1990, Plotkin began work with H. Fred Clark and Paul Offit on a vaccine against rotavirus, the leading cause of severe diarrhoea and dehydration in babies and young children worldwide. The project took about twenty years. Their vaccine, made by Merck as RotaTeq, was licensed in 2006 and added to the recommended U.S. infant schedule that year. Plotkin also led early work on a vaccine against cytomegalovirus, a common virus that can damage babies before birth, and he worked on vaccines against varicella and polio.
The man who wrote the book
In the 1980s Plotkin noticed that vaccine science had become a field of its own, separate from infectious disease and immunology, but had no textbook. He conceived one, and with co-editors who later included Walter Orenstein and Paul Offit he produced Vaccines, first published in 1988. Known as Plotkin’s Vaccines, it became the standard reference of the field and reached its eighth edition in 2025.
In 1991 he left Philadelphia to become medical and scientific director of Pasteur Mérieux Connaught, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers, based at Marnes-la-Coquette in France, and he later advised its successor company, Sanofi Pasteur. He was founding chairman of the Global Pertussis Initiative in 2001, and in 2017 he was a scientific adviser at the founding of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the international partnership set up to speed vaccines against new epidemic threats. His honours include the Bruce Medal, the French Legion of Honour (1998), the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal (2002) and the Maxwell Finland Award (2009).
Speaking up for vaccines
In his later decades Plotkin became one of the most experienced public defenders of immunisation. In a 2018 interview published in the journal Eurosurveillance, he described vaccine hesitancy as driven by fear and misinformation, observing that lies can travel as fast as truth. He said he was convinced that the discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism had been essentially made up, and he explained how people often wrongly blame a vaccine for a misfortune that would have happened anyway. He named imagination, curiosity and persistence as the qualities a good scientist needs.
He has also been candid about the limits of science. Of the rotavirus vaccine, he recalled that the team’s early assumption about how immunity worked turned out to be far too simple, a lesson he said he learned the hard way.
Jewish roots and family
Plotkin was born into a Jewish family; his parents, Lee and Joseph, were Jewish immigrants from England who raised him in New York. Like many children of Jewish immigrant families of his generation, he moved through the city’s public schools and New York University into medicine and science. He has not made religious practice a public part of his life story, and sources describe his background rather than his observance.
He married Susan Plotkin, who coordinated a pediatric AIDS programme, in 1980; they have two sons, Michael and Alec. He is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and the Wistar Institute and has continued to advise vaccine research and to work on cytomegalovirus well into his nineties.
Legacy
Plotkin’s rubella vaccine is one of the quiet triumphs of modern medicine. Given to hundreds of millions of children as part of MMR, it has prevented countless miscarriages and lifelong disabilities. In April 2015 the Pan American Health Organization declared the Americas the first region in the world free of endemic rubella, the culmination of a 15-year campaign with the MMR vaccine, and rubella has been eliminated in more than half of European countries as well.
Add to that the rabies vaccine, a rotavirus vaccine that protects infants from deadly dehydration, and a textbook that trained generations of vaccine scientists, and it is easy to see why he has been called the godfather of vaccines. The boy who was inspired by a novel about a doctor fighting an epidemic became the real thing.
Sources & further reading
Stanley Plotkin, Wikipedia · Stanley Alan Plotkin (1932– ), The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University · Stanley A. Plotkin, MD, History of Vaccines · Life in vaccine science: a conversation with Stanley Plotkin, Eurosurveillance (PMC) · Americas region is declared the world’s first to eliminate rubella, PAHO/WHO · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.