Maurice Ralph Hilleman was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity.
31 Facts About Maurice Hilleman
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Maurice Hilleman has been described as one of the most influential vaccinologists ever.
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Maurice Hilleman played a role in the discovery of antigenic shift and drift, the cold-producing adenoviruses, the hepatitis viruses, and the potentially cancer-causing virus SV40.
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Maurice Hilleman was born on a farm near the high plains town of Miles City, Montana.
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Maurice Hilleman's parents were Anna and Gustav Hillemann, and he was their eighth child.
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Maurice Hilleman's twin sister died when he was born, and his mother died two days later.
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Maurice Hilleman was raised in the nearby household of his uncle, Bob Hilleman, and worked in his youth on the family farm.
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Maurice Hilleman credited much of his success to his work with chickens as a boy; since the 1930s, fertile chicken eggs had often been used to grow viruses for vaccines.
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Maurice Hilleman won a fellowship to the University of Chicago and received his doctoral degree in microbiology in 1944.
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Maurice Hilleman showed that these infections were actually caused by a species of bacterium, Chlamydia trachomatis, that grows only inside of cells.
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Maurice Hilleman served on many national and international advisory boards and committees, academic, governmental and private, including the National Institutes of Health's Office of AIDS Research Program Evaluation and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the National Immunization Program.
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Maurice Hilleman was among the first to recognize that a 1957 outbreak of influenza in Hong Kong could become a huge pandemic.
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Maurice Hilleman was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal from the American military for his work.
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Maurice Hilleman's vaccine is believed to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
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Maurice Hilleman was one of the vaccine pioneers to warn about the possibility that simian viruses might contaminate vaccines.
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Maurice Hilleman cultivated material from her, and used it as the basis of a mumps vaccine.
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Maurice Hilleman considered his work on this vaccine to be his single greatest achievement.
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Maurice Hilleman retired as senior vice president of the Merck Research Labs in 1984 at its mandatory retirement age of 65.
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Maurice Hilleman then directed the newly created Merck Institute for Vaccinology where he worked for the next twenty years until his death in 2005.
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At the time of his death in Philadelphia on April 11,2005, at the age of 85, Maurice Hilleman was Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
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Maurice Hilleman was a forceful man yet at the same time, modest in his claims.
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Maurice Hilleman ran his laboratory like a military unit, and he was the one in command.
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Maurice Hilleman used profanity and tirades freely to drive his arguments home, and once, famously, refused to attend a mandatory "charm school" course intended to make Merck middle managers more civil.
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Maurice Hilleman was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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Maurice Hilleman received the Prince Mahidol Award from the King of Thailand for the advancement of public health, as well as a special lifetime achievement award from the World Health Organization, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service and the Sabin Gold Medal and Lifetime Achievement Awards.
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In 1975, Maurice Hilleman received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
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Maurice Hilleman should be recognized as the most successful vaccinologist in history.
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One can say without hyperbole that Maurice Hilleman has changed the world.
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In 2007, Paul Offit published a biography of Maurice Hilleman, entitled Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases.
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Maurice Hilleman was perhaps the single most influential public health figure of the twentieth century, if one considers the millions of lives saved and the countless people who were spared suffering because of his work.
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In 2016, Montana State University dedicated a series of scholarships in memory of its alumnus Maurice Hilleman, called the Maurice Hilleman Scholars Program, for incoming students who "commit to work at their education beyond ordinary expectations and help future scholars that come after them".