The Vaccine Race

by Meredith Wadman

  The better responses, the authors added, “were achieved without any important increase in clinical reactions and there was no evidence for contagious spread of the infection.” Admittedly, a handful of children who were injected with Plotkin’s WI-38–grown vaccine developed rashes and swollen lymph nodes—a handful slightly larger than the smattering of kids who developed rashes and swollen lymph nodes after receiving the Merck duck vaccine. But these were “inconsequential” in terms of bothering the children, the scientists wrote. By contrast, the rate of arthritis in adult women receiving Plotkin’s vaccine was “substantially lower” than with Merck’s.25

  Physicians and the FDA hadn’t needed to wait until 1980 to see similar results. In 1978 Horstmann and her colleagues published the long-in-the-making paper comparing the Plotkin vaccine head to head with its two licensed U.S. competitors among children in Danbury, Connecticut. It too showed that the RA 27/3 vaccine generated higher, longer-lasting levels of protective antibodies than Merck’s HPV-77 duck-embryo vaccine—or the Cendehill vaccine made by Smith, Kline & French.26

  On September 15, 1978, the FDA granted Merck a license for its WI-38–based rubella vaccine.27 Merck’s new vaccine soon became the only one on the U.S. market and remains so to this day. Its only other competitor, the Cendehill vaccine, was withdrawn in 1979.

  The Plotkin vaccine virus, RA 27/3, is also used in most of the rest of the world.

  PART THREE

  The WI-38 Wars

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Slaughtered Babies and Skylab

  Stanford, California

  June 1972–September 1973

  One lung—well, a pair of lungs. The Children for [sic] God and all those other people saying you have to kill embryos constantly. It’s not true. One embryo will last generations.

  —Leonard Hayflick, October 3, 20121

  In June 1972 an obscure marriage counselor in Brighton, Michigan, named Dr. Forrest Stevenson Jr., published a pamphlet entitled “Women, the Bible and Abortion.” It linked abortion to communism, to Hitler, and to selective elimination of the ill and the elderly. It had subheadings that included “Dollar Bills and Dead Babies” and “Why Would a Woman Want an Abortion?”

  The only text in the pamphlet that was boxed for special attention concerned “Dr. Leonard Hayflick at Stanford University.” It explained that “in another atrocity connected with abortion, vaccines are now being produced from aborted babies.”

  The pamphlet informed readers of Hayflick’s motive—to avoid the “senseless slaying” of animals during vaccine making—and his methods: “The baby is injected with a live virus and kept alive for several hours until his body is filled with the disease. They then slaughter him, his blood is drained out and manufactured into serum.”

  The next sentence was in uppercase: “YOUR CHILD’S NEXT IMMUNIZATION SHOT MAY BE CANNIBALIZED FROM A SLAUGHTERED BABY.”2

  The political environment in mid-1972 was primed for this “news” about Hayflick to take root. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently heard a first round of arguments in the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade, and the high court justices would hear the case argued again that October. Also that autumn the voters in Stevenson’s home state of Michigan were preparing to weigh in on a ballot measure permitting abortion on demand through twenty weeks of pregnancy.

  Stevenson’s bulletin circulated in churches during the summer. It also found its way into an antiabortion publication called Capitol Region Life Line, which reached readers in New York State. That autumn the letters began to arrive in Hayflick’s mailbox. They came from Michigan and from Troy, Elmhurst, and Brooklyn, New York. They were from women who wrote in elegant cursive and often signed with their husbands’ names. One asked if it was true that live aborted fetuses were being kept alive and vivisected for the sake of vaccines. How could he justify this murder? Another pronounced herself “appalled” that humans were being treated no better than animals, which were horribly abused enough. Another asked if it would soon be the turn of the elderly to contribute their bodies to the cause and inquired how old he was.

  Stevenson’s pamphlet reached a slightly broader audience on October 26, 1972, as part of a letter to the editor in the Sentinel, a newspaper in L’Anse, Michigan, with a circulation of three thousand. One week later Michiganders overwhelmingly rejected the abortion-on-demand ballot measure, with 61 percent voting against it.3

  By late November Hayflick had enlisted the help of James Siena, the legal adviser to Stanford’s president. He wrote to Stevenson, threatening to sue if Stevenson did not publish and widely circulate a retraction.4 By the following April Siena had secured a signed retraction from Stevenson, whom his lawyer, Arthur F. Barkey, described as “a wonderful, warm person, genuinely interested in the future of our human species.” In the same paragraph Barkey warned Hayflick and Stanford off suing. If they did, he cautioned, Stevenson “will be defended to the hilt by the combined resources of the pro-life groups in Michigan.”5

  The retraction, parts of which were published in several newspapers, read as follows:

  April 7, 1973

  Dear Dr. Hayflick,

  On prior occasion, I have published and given circulation to a statement which alleged that a process for producing vaccines from live aborted babies was developed at Stanford University. . . . I now understand that no such process was developed at Stanford University and that you made no such statement. Instead, I understand that you are the originator of a process whereby vaccines are produced from a culture consisting of a strain of cells originally taken from the lungs of a single surgically aborted female fetus of four months gestation in 1962. I apologize for any embarrassment which these misstatements may have caused to you or to Stanford University. I assure you that I have ceased publication of this statement and I intend not to repeat it on any future occasion.

  Sincerely,

  Forrest C. Stevenson, Jr.6

  The retraction came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous decision that January in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion-on-demand in the first trimester of pregnancy and, beginning in the second trimester and until the point when the fetus was capable of meaningful life outside the womb, allowing states to enact abortion-governing regulations only if they were “reasonably” related to preserving and protecting the mother’s health.

  As the huge implications of the high court’s ruling reverberated around the country, the baby-slaying allegations kept getting reprinted every month or two, usually as letters to the editor from local antiabortion groups in publications like the Mining Journal in Marquette, Michigan; the Altamont Enterprise in Altamont, New York; the Gazette Times in Heppner, Oregon; and the American Way Features: A Balanced, Unique and Time-Saving Weekly Editorial Service for News Media Dedicated to God, Truth, Freedom, Morality, Capitalism and Constitutional Government, based in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

  Hayflick fought back with typical tenacity, contacting every publication, no matter how small, enclosing Stevenson’s retraction and insisting that the publication correct the record. His manila file folder labeled “Stevenson” grew to be an inch thick.

  July 20, 1973

  Passaic County Right to Life Newsletter

  LIFE LINE

  P.O. Box P-48

  Clifton, N.J. 07011

  Gentlemen:

  It has recently come to my attention that your April–May 1973 Newsletter “Life Line,” Vol. 1, No. 3 repeats a most vicious falsehood concerning my research activities. . . . I regret sincerely that you did not have the wisdom to determine the veracity of this statement before publishing it.

  Had you made an effort to do so you would have learned that the originator and perpetrator of this calumny has fully retracted the monstrous charges that he himself invented and which you have repeated. I enclose a copy of his retraction for your consideration.

  Because of your deep interest in fairness, ho
nesty, justice and the right to life of the innocent, I would urge you to publish the attachment in order to clear the good names and reputation of the people and organizations that you have unjustly injured.

  I would appreciate having a copy of the issue of Life Line in which you will publish the attached retraction.

  Sincerely yours,

  Leonard Hayflick, PhD.

  Professor7

  His records do not show that Hayflick received any response.

  • • •

  While Hayflick beat back the brushfires lit by Stevenson, one abortion opponent sought to engage the Roman Catholic Church in protesting the use of WI-38 cells. On May 2, 1973, James Ambrose, a resident of Fallbrook, in northern San Diego County, California, perused an article by United Press International that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The writer reported from Stanford that “living human cells will be orbited in outer space aboard Skylab for 28 days to determine effects of prolonged weightlessness.”8

  The article did not identify WI-38 cells, which were in fact the cells that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had chosen, and that Hayflick had gamely provided, for the upcoming zero-gravity experiments on Skylab, America’s first experimental space station. But it did quote Hayflick saying, “This marks the first time that scientists will be able to assess the effects of prolonged space flights at the cellular level.”

  A suspicious Ambrose got out his typewriter and wrote to Joseph T. McGucken, the archbishop of San Francisco, whose geographical domain included Stanford. He asked for a “penetrating inquiry.” The article didn’t mention human fetuses or embryos, he conceded, but “silence can be eloquent,” he wrote. “I therefore question the morality of this experiment, and I refer it to Your Excellency for consideration and possible action.”9

  Ambrose didn’t get the response he was looking for from McGucken, a liberal who supported Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize farm workers, spoke out against Proposition 14, an anti-fair-housing ballot measure, and clearly wasn’t predisposed to make an issue of the scientific use of WI-38 cells. McGucken first wrote to Hayflick asking for the facts and received a prompt response. He thanked Hayflick in another letter, saying that he was confident that Ambrose would be satisfied with Hayflick’s explanation that the abortion had happened long ago and far away.

  There was more to come, however. Hayflick recalls that he was working in his home office on the Stanford campus on Saturday morning, July 28, 1973, when he took a call from a top medical official at NASA.10 The second manned mission to Skylab had just launched from Cape Canaveral. Aboard were three astronauts and a bevy of experimental material, including the WI-38 cells. The NASA scientist told Hayflick that he was now contending with questions from reporters, prompted by antiabortion activists who were protesting the cells’ presence on the Saturn 1B rocket now hurtling toward the space station. He needed information about the WI-38 cells’ origins.

  Hayflick, in what had begun to feel like a very familiar routine, explained that the cells had been derived from the lungs of a single fetus, legally aborted in Sweden a decade earlier. The senior NASA official said he would take the information back to the reporters. Hayflick didn’t hear from him again.

  The Skylab study, NASA Experiment Number SO15, went ahead. The cells were packaged in a clunky, airtight black box with white knobs called the “Woodlawn Wanderer Nine.” It was a miniaturized, fully automated lab, and during the astronauts’ fifty-nine-day mission, the cells grew on glass in a miniature chamber inside it, bathed in medium and kept at a comfortable 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Every twelve hours a motorized pump injected fresh medium and spent medium was forced out. Tiny microscopes were focused on the cells and time-lapse photos of them taken every 3.2 minutes, creating a film that would allow scientists to study their rate of multiplication, among other things. In the meantime a set of control WI-38 cells was being put through the same paces back on Earth. In the end the NASA team found no differences between the Earth-bound WI-38 cells and those sent on the space adventure: their dividing times, growth curves, chromosomes, and appearances remained the same.11

  “The zero-gravity experiments produced no detectable effects on WI-38,” the resulting paper concluded anticlimactically. The study did generate some gorgeous electron micrographs, and it was published as part of the proceedings of a Skylab symposium in 1974. One of the micrographs was a close-up of a long, tendril-like projection of a WI-38 cell as it prepared to divide. At the distant tip of the tendril, its edges had grown roundish extensions, due to cytoplasmic bubbling that characteristically occurs just as the cell divides. Shot against a deep black background lit only by occasional starlike, glowing dots, the long, odd-shaped tendril itself looked like a strange interstellar body. But it was in fact a cell from the unborn fetus of Mrs. X, suspended 270 miles above the Earth, in the midst of circumnavigating 858 times the strange planet that held Hayflick and Plotkin and Koprowski and Mrs. X and untold numbers of babies and children with congenital rubella.

  • • •

  The retraction from the marriage counselor Forrest Stevenson didn’t mollify many of Hayflick’s critics. That was clear from responses like one from a Mrs. Raymond Somerville of Troy, New York. Hayflick had sent her a copy of the retraction. She replied that she saw very little distinction between what had in fact happened to produce the WI-38 cells and what Stevenson had described in his pamphlet. The “defenseless human being” that was an unborn child, she wrote, could not give informed consent.12

  Yawning between Hayflick and his adversaries was an apparently unbridgeable gulf in belief about the moral status of the fetus.

  The campaign by the adherents of Stevenson tailed off that summer. Abortion opponents were perhaps preoccupied with bigger issues on the heels of the Roe v. Wade decision. It would be the new millennium before vocal religious opposition to WI-38 again emerged. By then the organizers would have become more sophisticated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Cells, Inc.

  Stanford, California, 1971–75

  I was convinced that I had done nothing wrong. For someone to believe that I would steal something is completely outside of my personality.

  —Leonard Hayflick, October 16, 20121

  In the 1970s biology was on the brink of major changes. The days of the medical scientist as a selfless, salaried public servant were about to give way to the commercialization of biology. Beginning in 1980, new laws and court decisions allowed biologists to make serious money on their inventions. The changes blurred the once-sacred boundaries between business and biology, and by the early 1980s they were turning some biological scientists into wealthy men. Like an overeager guest, Hayflick would find himself arriving at this party just a little too early.

  In February 1971 Hayflick took the next fateful step on the road that began in 1968, when he packed the WI-38 cells into the family sedan and drove them cross-country from the Wistar Institute to Stanford. Like so many roads that people follow to their detriment, this one was paved with many significant but quiet choices, rather than one great, dramatic moment of decision. Nevertheless, it led to a place nearly unimaginable for a man of Hayflick’s growing prominence.

  That February Hayflick opened an account at the Great Western Savings and Loan Association in Palo Alto. He named it “Cell Culture Fund.” During his first three years at Stanford, until this moment, he had been keeping the money he collected to cover the costs of preparing and shipping WI-38 cultures in a Stanford University account. (He would later tell NIH investigators that he abandoned the university account because it wasn’t interest-bearing.)2 The exception was his shipments of WI-38 cells to researchers studying aging. The costs of these shipments were paid for by his 1969 contract with the NIH, which was still in effect, and he didn’t collect money for sending out those cells.

  Hayflick had intended, he says, when he left the Wistar Institute with most of the world’s yo
ungest WI-38 cells in tow, to find appropriate lawyers to weigh in on who owned the cells.*

  He believed the question was in dispute. If he was aware of the wording of the original 1962 contract under which he had derived the WI-38 cells, which stated that title to materials developed under it passed to the government when the contract was terminated—as it was in 1968—he chose to ignore it.3

  As for the action plan formulated in a Wistar conference room on that January day in 1968, under which virtually all of the ampules were to be transferred to the American Type Culture Collection, to steward them on behalf of the NIH—well, he may have been at the meeting where it was agreed on, but he had been an unwilling participant.4

  During the next three years, from February 1971 until March 1974, Hayflick deposited in the Cell Culture Fund at the Great Western Savings and Loan a total of $13,349.84 that he collected for preparing and shipping the cells to researchers outside the field of aging.5 Hayflick also raised his prices beginning in 1972, in line, he says, with what the American Type Culture Collection was then charging.6 The nonprofit ATCC was the highest-profile cell bank in the country, and its pricing could be taken as a standard. But Hayflick kept bumping up his prices, and by August 1974 he was charging academic scientists $35, nearly twice as much as the ATCC charged, for a starter culture of WI-38 cells, and he was charging commercial firms $250—more than eight times as much as the cell repository charged.7

  On March 12, 1974, he closed the “Cell Culture Fund” with its accrued $13,000 and change. One week later, on March 19, he incorporated Cell Associates in the state of California, with himself and his wife, Ruth, as sole stockholders.8 Hayflick opened a corporate account in the company’s name at the Great Western Savings and Loan, and beginning in April 1974, he deposited the money he collected for WI-38 cell preparation and shipments in this account. He did not spend any of it, he says, adding that he was simply waiting for the opportunity to enlist a lawyer to sort out whose funds they were—to sort out who owned WI-38.