- How do modern vaccines and targeted cancer therapies draw on both Mechnikov's and Ehrlich's discoveries?
Vaccines and Immunization
The development and history of vaccines against disease.
- How does anaphylaxis differ from the protective effect of vaccination?
- Why did Calmette and Guérin cultivate their tuberculosis strain through 230 successive generations before it was safe to use?
- Who received the first BCG vaccine, and what were the circumstances of that first dose?
- How effective is the BCG vaccine against pulmonary tuberculosis in adults compared to severe childhood TB?
- How did Max Theiler weaken the yellow fever virus by passing it through mouse brains and chick embryos?
- Why is Theiler the only person to win a Nobel for a vaccine derived from a virus he cultured himself?
- Why did Salk choose to inactivate poliovirus with formaldehyde rather than use a live-attenuated strain?
- Why did Salk first test his vaccine on children who had already survived polio?
- How did the 1952 trials lead to the 1954 field trial of 1.8 million children?
- Why could poliovirus previously only be grown in living nerve tissue, and what problem did that create for vaccine production?
- Why did the Nobel committee award this prize in 1954, before Jonas Salk's vaccine trials had even returned results?
- Why did Jonas Salk never receive a Nobel Prize despite building the vaccine that ended polio's epidemics?
- How does Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine trigger immunity without being able to cause the disease itself?
- How large was the 1954 field trial that tested the Salk vaccine, and why did its scale matter for the results announced in 1955?
- How much did polio case counts in the United States fall in the years immediately after the vaccine's approval?
- What methods did the WHO's smallpox eradication campaign use to track down and stop the disease's spread across more than forty countries?
- Who was the last person to catch smallpox naturally, and what happened to him?
- Why does smallpox remain the only human disease ever deliberately driven to extinction?
- How does understanding antibody gene shuffling help explain autoimmune disease and inform vaccine design?
- What downstream medical practices, like cancer immunotherapy and vaccine design, depend on this principle of self-plus-foreign recognition?
- Which HPV strains did zur Hausen identify as most responsible for cervical cancer, and how did that lead to a vaccine?
- How is the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine engineered to trigger immunity using a different virus as a carrier?
- What is ring vaccination, and how was it used to test the Ebola vaccine during the 2018–2020 DRC outbreak?
- What was the measured efficacy of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, and when did regulators approve it?
- Why did it take more than four decades after Ebola's 1976 discovery to license a vaccine against it?
- How quickly did BioNTech and Moderna begin designing vaccine candidates after the viral sequence was published?
- How long did it take from the virus being sequenced to the first vaccines receiving emergency authorisation?
- How did this single discovery enable the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines?
- How long did it take from Karikó and Weissman's 2005 paper to its use in the COVID-19 vaccines?