The Vaccine Race
Page 62
* Regarding the risk of vaccination to pregnant women, over the next two decades, through 1989, the CDC would follow to term the pregnancies of 305 rubella-susceptible women who were inadvertently vaccinated within three months before or after conception. None of the women gave birth to rubella-affected infants. Today the CDC advises that women who inadvertently receive a rubella vaccine while pregnant should be counseled that there is a theoretical risk of up to 2.6 percent that the fetus will be affected. It adds that several additional studies have shown no cases of congenital rubella in about 1,000 infants of susceptible women who were vaccinated while they were pregnant, or just before conceiving.
* The Medical Research Council in London still had some of the original WI-38 ampules—ampules of cells that had divided just eight or nine times. Hayflick had given 100 of them to the MRC in the fall of 1962 and had sent more ampules to the London agency from time to time.
* Unlike measles, it’s extremely rare for mumps to turn deadly, but it causes permanent deafness in some children and brain inflammation in others. In post-pubertal boys and men mumps can cause an excruciating inflammation of the testicles and, rarely, permanent sterility.
* In 1983 President Ronald Reagan used an executive order to extend the Bayh-Dole Act to cover big businesses, too. Because any future president can reverse it, an executive order is not as ironclad as a bill passed by Congress and signed into law. In 1986 a new law (the Federal Technology Transfer Act) allowed big businesses with special contracts with government-operated labs to be awarded patents.
* Normally, exclusive licenses were needed to lure commercial investors. However, the Cohen-Boyer patents were so broadly applicable and the technology they enabled so important and so much in demand that Neils Reimers, the Stanford patent guru who was managing the patents on behalf of both Stanford and UC, refused Genentech’s demand that they be licensed exclusively to the company.
* Wright would go on to propose that the fundamental reason that normal cells stop dividing is to prevent cancer from forming. Cancer cells require many mutations to become malignant, and normal cells can’t accumulate these if they stop dividing.
* The World Health Organization says that WI-38 cells can be used for vaccine making until about ten generations before they stop dividing.
* For the same reasons, the WHO and the FDA do not limit residual DNA in vaccines made in MRC-5 cells, derived from a British fetus in 1966.
* There is one exception. Under a 1993 law fetal tissue from an abortion can’t be transplanted into a human being for therapeutic purposes—think, for instance, of Parkinson’s disease, for which fetal tissue transplants have been tried as a treatment—without the informed consent of the woman who had the abortion, even if the tissue has been stripped of identifiers.
* Because of forceful protests a quarter century ago from intellectually disabled people and their advocates—a right-to-participate-in-research campaign, in effect—there are no special protections in the U.S. regulations for this group. The issue is not simple. The advocates were concerned, among other things, that if researchers had to jump through too many hoops to conduct studies, clinical research on mental illnesses would be neglected.
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