UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

JAD ABUMRAD: Before we start, I just want to let you know there is a moment or two of strong language in the story.

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIOLAB INTRO)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Wait. Wait. You're listening (laughter)...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: You're listening...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Listening...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: ...To RADIOLAB...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: RADIOLAB.

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: From WNYC.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: C?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yup.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad. This is RADIOLAB. And today...

MATT KIELTY: Hello.

JAD ABUMRAD: ...Matthew Kielty.

MATT KIELTY: Hey, hey, hey.

JAD ABUMRAD: A story from our producer, Matthew Kielty.

MATT KIELTY: Heather's also here.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, Radke. How's it going?

HEATHER RADKE: Good. How are you doing?

JAD ABUMRAD: And reporter Heather Radke.

Where do you guys want to start?

HEATHER RADKE: So...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily."

HEATHER RADKE: Rewind back to the early days of the pandemic.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: Today...

HEATHER RADKE: Mid-April...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: ...As President Trump...

HEATHER RADKE: ...I was listening to "The Daily." It was one of these episodes about the pandemic. And on the show, they had...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: Science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.

HEATHER RADKE: Don McNeil Jr. I remember in those early days of the pandemic, when Don McNeil came onto "The Daily," you sort of knew you were going to get some bad news and that he was going to just sort of tell you how serious this thing was.

JAD ABUMRAD: Don't they call him, like, Doomsday Don or something?

HEATHER RADKE: I mean, I've never heard that, but I wouldn't - I'm not surprised. Because, like, back in February...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: The portraits of the future that you have painted for us have been strikingly accurate.

HEATHER RADKE: He was telling us that the schools were going to close, that we were all going to be stuck in our houses for weeks or months...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: Those happened.

HEATHER RADKE: ...That there wasn't going to be enough personal protective equipment.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: Just about everything you said would happen has more or less happened.

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: Well, look. I'm not some dark angel who's simply looking into the future.

HEATHER RADKE: But he kind of is (laughter). I don't know. But anyway, so in this show...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: I'm talking to experts.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Which was in April, they're talking about - like, they're kind of playing out the future of the pandemic and what our world might look like...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: You know, we're not going to be able to let people sit next to each other in football stadiums...

HEATHER RADKE: ...About what sports might look like...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: Let half the kids go to school this week.

HEATHER RADKE: ...How schools might work...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: Next week, the other half of the kids get to come to school.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Eating out.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: A restaurant that had 100 customers before now has about 10 customers in it.

HEATHER RADKE: Eerily prescient.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: And how long...

HEATHER RADKE: But then Barbaro's like...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

MICHAEL BARBARO: At some point do we just get to go back to normal?

HEATHER RADKE: And then McNeil says, look. This pandemic will end...

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: ...When we have a vaccine that we can all take.

HEATHER RADKE: The vaccine's the thing that's going to end this.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: But the record we've ever had for producing a vaccine is four years.

HEATHER RADKE: The fastest vaccine we've ever made was the mumps vaccine.

(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE DAILY")

DONALD G MCNEIL JR: Yeah, the fastest human vaccine ever made was mumps - four years from start to finish.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: Now, if you are a person who consumes information, you're probably well aware of the fact that, like, we are going to break that record. Like, we're probably going to obliterate that record. We are going to have a vaccine much faster than four years. And, I mean, that's because COVID is a completely world-altering, destructive pandemic that we have devoted millions upon millions of dollars to. Thousands and thousands of people have been working day and night to come up with a vaccine.

But - and maybe you're wondering at this point where I'm going with this. But when Heather heard that episode of "The Daily," she and I got to talking. And we started to look into this story about mumps, about what will soon be the second-fastest vaccine we've ever made. And what we found is standing in the center of it is weirdly just this one guy...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: ...A scientist named Maurice Hilleman, a guy who somehow embodied all of what ridding the world of a disease requires of us. But before we get to Maurice...

HEATHER RADKE: What are the mumps?

MATT KIELTY: Exactly.

Can you hear me there?

PAUL OFFIT: I can hear you, yeah.

MATT KIELTY: So we talked to this guy, Paul Offit...

HEATHER RADKE: ...Director of the Vaccine Education Center...

PAUL OFFIT: And a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

MATT KIELTY: How are things going in your world right now?

PAUL OFFIT: They're pretty busy. I've actually never been busier in my life. And I'm older, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

HEATHER RADKE: Paul's on an FDA advisory committee for the COVID vaccines.

PAUL OFFIT: We had a meeting last Thursday, which was a nine-hour meeting. It was shown on C-SPAN.

HEATHER RADKE: Oh.

MATT KIELTY: Wow.

HEATHER RADKE: That is a long meeting.

MATT KIELTY: But anyway, so we asked Paul...

HEATHER RADKE: What is mumps, and how is it contagious?

PAUL OFFIT: In the same way that SARS-CoV-2 is contagious, which is it spreads by small respiratory droplets that emanate from the mouth and nose.

MATT KIELTY: So, like, coughing, sneezing, talking, kissing.

PAUL OFFIT: And mostly, the virus infected children.

HEATHER RADKE: And the main symptom of mumps is that your face kind of swells up.

MATT KIELTY: Like, your cheeks swell up and around your jaw.

PAUL OFFIT: So you have this chipmunk-like appearance.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BRADY BUNCH")

FLORENCE HENDERSON: (As Carol Brady, singing) I want to be loved by you...

PAUL OFFIT: So kids who got mumps just looked like these, like, cute, little chipmunks...

HEATHER RADKE: ...Which meant the mumps was great for things like the plotline in "The Brady Bunch."

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BRADY BUNCH")

MELISSA SUE ANDERSON: (As Millicent) The doctor thinks I may have the mumps.

HEATHER RADKE: And...

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BRADY BUNCH")

MIKE LOOKINLAND: (As Bobby Brady) The mumps?

HEATHER RADKE: ...In...

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GOOD TIMES")

UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) Good times.

HEATHER RADKE: ..."Good Times."

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GOOD TIMES")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: Hey, hey, hey.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (Speaking German).

MATT KIELTY: ...Some old German cartoon.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (Speaking German).

PAUL OFFIT: There's a Coasters song...

(SOUNDBITE OF THE COASTERS SONG, "POISON IVY")

PAUL OFFIT: ...Called "Poison Ivy."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "POISON IVY")

THE COASTERS: (Singing) Measles make you mumpy, and mumps will make you lumpy...

PAUL OFFIT: Ask your parents about it.

HEATHER RADKE: (Laughter).

I found this old vaudeville song about a kid getting mumps that I...

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAYING FLUTE)

HEATHER RADKE: ...Tested out on my flute.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLAYING FLUTE)

JAD ABUMRAD: Did not see the flute coming.

(LAUGHTER)

MATT KIELTY: Like, mumps is, like, the cutest disease you can have.

JAD ABUMRAD: Is it fatal?

PAUL OFFIT: Not really.

HEATHER RADKE: No.

PAUL OFFIT: I mean, it causes - it can infect the lining of the brain and spinal cord...

HEATHER RADKE: Which could cause deafness.

PAUL OFFIT: But it doesn't really kill you, no.

MATT KIELTY: So it's not really...

HEATHER RADKE: You know, Matt, I got to say, one thing I wish I was in here was the real problem with mumps, which is that men lose their virility. I feel like you're avoiding sort of (laughter)...

MATT KIELTY: I'm not avoiding it, Heather.

JAD ABUMRAD: (Laughter).

HEATHER RADKE: I'm just saying, the big problem with mumps is that men's testicles become enormous, and they can't walk, and then they sometimes can't have children. And it scared everybody in the Army. And that's why mumps was a big deal.

MATT KIELTY: It's - yeah.

HEATHER RADKE: Add that in.

PAUL OFFIT: (Laughter).

MATT KIELTY: It's in. It's...

JAD ABUMRAD: But wait. Are you saying seriously that the big push for, like, why this particular vaccine happened so fast is because it was very male-centered and it worried a lot of Army guys?

PAUL OFFIT: No.

MATT KIELTY: No. Because this is actually where we get back to our one guy, Maurice Hilleman.

PAUL OFFIT: Maurice Hilleman, I think, is the father of modern vaccines.

HEATHER RADKE: I mean, he's one of these guys that...

PAUL OFFIT: He is the vaccine master.

HEATHER RADKE: ...In all of his bios and obituaries, you'll read something like, he might be the greatest biologist of the 20th century.

PAUL OFFIT: Right. He's estimated - his work is estimated to save about 8 million lives a year.

JAD ABUMRAD: Whoa.

HEATHER RADKE: Then, you'll read something that's like, he was the greatest scientist of the 20th century.

PAUL OFFIT: We live longer because of him. We live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago, largely because of the efforts of Maurice Hilleman.

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, my God.

HEATHER RADKE: And then you'll come across something that says he may be the greatest scientist that's ever lived.

PAUL OFFIT: I wish he was alive today.

(CROSSTALK)

MATT KIELTY: So Maurice Hilleman died in 2005 of cancer at the age of 85. But just months before his death, Paul actually interviewed him.

PAUL OFFIT: I just wanted to get his stories down.

HEATHER RADKE: They knew each other pretty well.

PAUL OFFIT: And he was nice enough to let me interview him for 60 or 70 hours or so in the last six months of his life.

MATT KIELTY: And also...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: So getting back to...

MATT KIELTY: ...A film crew interviewed Maurice before his death, and they were generous enough to give us some of that tape.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Well, I'm Maurice Hilleman, and I had a long career in science - about 60 years - doing basic research and the development of a large number of new vaccines.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: So give me a little bit of your personal history.

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Well, you might ask, well, how did you ever become a Montanan?

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: So go back - late 1800s. Hilleman's great-uncle, a scout in the Army, ends up settling in Montana in this little town...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...Called Miles Town...

MATT KIELTY: ...Now called Miles City.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...Engaged in illicit businesses. I think it was largely prostitution (laughter).

MATT KIELTY: Eventually, more of the family came up, settled alongside him.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: It's a rich farmland there.

MATT KIELTY: Big, wide-open spaces.

HEATHER RADKE: His mom and dad worked a farm. They had seven kids. And then Maurice was born.

PAUL OFFIT: Around the time of the great flu pandemic.

MATT KIELTY: 1919.

JAD ABUMRAD: So he was born right in the middle of second-wave flu.

HEATHER RADKE: Mmm hmm. And his mother got really sick right after he was born. And he had a twin sister. And both the twin sister and the mom actually died, and he was the only survivor of the birth.

JAD ABUMRAD: Whoa.

MATT KIELTY: And Maurice's father actually gave Maurice away to his aunt and uncle, who lived right next door. So he had this very kind of strange childhood where he would work the farm with his siblings and his biological father. They would go to the same church, all of them together. But then at the end of the day, he would go to be with his aunt and uncle by himself.

PAUL OFFIT: And I think he always wanted to be seen. He would mention that, that he wanted to be seen by his father.

MATT KIELTY: Offit said it was a sort of driving force in his life.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HEATHER RADKE: So it's the '20s in Montana.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: You really became a workaholic to survive.

MATT KIELTY: By age 4, he's going to town to sell strawberries at the market.

HEATHER RADKE: Back on the farm...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: We had a blacksmith shop. We had a machine shop.

(SOUNDBITE OF HAMMER HAMMERING)

HEATHER RADKE: There were all sorts of animals.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: And...

HEATHER RADKE: As he got older...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...One of my jobs was to take care of the chickens.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS CLUCKING)

HEATHER RADKE: He fed them, and he corralled them and collected their eggs.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: I got to know chickens.

HEATHER RADKE: And then there were these stories about how, like, before he's 10, he...

(SOUNDBITE OF TRAIN RUMBLING)

HEATHER RADKE: ...Is almost hit by a freight train.

PAUL OFFIT: Literally, a train was coming in the other direction.

HEATHER RADKE: He almost suffocates from diphtheria. He, like...

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, my God.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Somehow, like, follows a hobo into a waterfall, but he can't swim, and he almost drowns.

JAD ABUMRAD: This kid is cursed.

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah. Life in Montana was tough.

PAUL OFFIT: And so he saw himself as a remarkable survivor.

HEATHER RADKE: And he becomes a pretty tough person because of it. But he also becomes very interested in science. So Hilleman's biological dad - he was, like, super Lutheran, really, really devout.

MATT KIELTY: He was an avid prayer. He believed in faith healing, that God could cure disease.

HEATHER RADKE: And Paul said that maybe as sort of a reaction to it...

PAUL OFFIT: ...Or of a rejection of it...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Reading) When onboard HMS Beagle as naturalist...

HEATHER RADKE: Hilleman fell in love with Darwin.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Reading) ...I was much struck with certain facts.

JAD ABUMRAD: He literally - like, Darwin is what drew him to the dark side?

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah.

PAUL OFFIT: I mean, he told me the story with glee about how he would sit in church and...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Reading) ...Seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species...

PAUL OFFIT: ...Read Darwin's "On The Origin Of Species."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Reading) ...That mystery of mysteries.

MATT KIELTY: Unlike his dad's religion that was all about mystery and faith...

PAUL OFFIT: This was logical and ordered and reasoned and based on things you could see.

HEATHER RADKE: And he kind of becomes enraptured with this other kind of Bible.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: And he goes from reading Darwin to...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...Paul Ehrlich and von Behring and Pasteur...

MATT KIELTY: ...These great microbiologists...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: ...Who had done groundbreaking research in this still new, emerging field.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Virology.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: The science of viruses.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: The whole business of viruses as the branch between the living and the dead - I had really gotten interested in this.

MATT KIELTY: Now, when he finished high school, he actually didn't plan on going to college. It would take his brother coming back from seminary school to push him to keep going with his education.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: So I did go to Montana State.

HEATHER RADKE: He studies microbiology.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Worked pretty hard.

MATT KIELTY: There are stories about how he would spend his weekends in the lab.

HEATHER RADKE: About how he had four experiments going at once.

MATT KIELTY: And in 1941, he graduates.

HEATHER RADKE: Goes to the University of Chicago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: The intellectual center of its time.

MATT KIELTY: Starts his Ph.D. work.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: On chlamydia.

MATT KIELTY: For years, people have been looking for a vaccine to chlamydia, which everybody thought was a virus.

HEATHER RADKE: And in a year, Hilleman discovers it's actually not a virus at all.

MATT KIELTY: It was a bacteria.

PAUL OFFIT: And it could be treated with antibiotics. That's what he did as his Ph.D. thesis when he was 25 years old.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

HEATHER RADKE: A huge accomplishment. Then...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: 1944.

HEATHER RADKE: He graduates.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: From a pretty damn good school and was wooed by academia.

MATT KIELTY: To become a professor.

HEATHER RADKE: Which was what he was expected to become.

PAUL OFFIT: That's what you did.

MATT KIELTY: You went off and followed the path of those who came before you in the pursuit of knowledge in these vaunted public institutions, where you would burrow in, do your research for the good of the public.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: And Hilleman was like, no.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: I wanted to go out and see how the big world operated, the big world of the practical.

PAUL OFFIT: He wanted to make things, much as he had made them on the farm. He wanted to produce things.

MATT KIELTY: So he goes to work for this small pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Then he gets drafted.

HEATHER RADKE: Well, but first, I mean, don't sleep on the Japanese encephalitis.

MATT KIELTY: Oh, yeah.

HEATHER RADKE: So he creates this vaccine for Japanese encephalitis, which is this horrible disease that causes brain swelling and had been killing people in Asia for a really long time. And then the Army asks him to develop a vaccine so that soldiers don't die of it when they're there; they're not affected by it. And he does.

MATT KIELTY: And that's the first vaccine that he makes.

HEATHER RADKE: Does he do the Hong Kong thing when he's in the Army? I think he does.

MATT KIELTY: Doot-do-doo (ph). In late '40s, institutions (ph) - modern strains of influenza. Yes, in 1948, he goes to Walter Reed.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Yes. When I went to Walter Reed, it was - my assignment was, very simply, learn everything you can about influenza.

HEATHER RADKE: You know, 1919 isn't that far away from the mid-'40s. The pandemic is really in everyone's memory.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: So my job was to prevent the next pandemic.

HEATHER RADKE: To figure out how to prevent another one.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: So what I did...

HEATHER RADKE: Basically, he goes through - looking through all these samples of flu that they have at Walter Reed, and he discovers that the flu virus changes every year. And he figures out how it does that and why and then helps to...

JAD ABUMRAD: Whoa.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Create a system for making a new vaccine every year.

JAD ABUMRAD: So he is the reason that we have to get a new flu shot every year?

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

MATT KIELTY: He's also the first to discover how viruses shift when they jump back and forth between humans and, like, birds or bats.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

MATT KIELTY: Which allows him, in 1957, to become the first human being ever to avert a pandemic because he's able to see it coming. It was coming from Hong Kong. He's able to tweak the flu vaccine. People are inoculated. He's able to save at least, like, a million lives in America.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

MATT KIELTY: He's given the presidential medal for science.

JAD ABUMRAD: This guy's just, like - he's on quite a run.

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah.

JAD ABUMRAD: After his miserable child years.

HEATHER RADKE: I know. I mean, you've really...

JAD ABUMRAD: Do you...

HEATHER RADKE: Oh, go ahead.

JAD ABUMRAD: OK, sorry. No, no, no. I was going to ask a question, but I think it's coming. So maybe I'll - maybe don't answer it if you're about to. How does - I'm searching for some way to understand why he was so gifted at this particular corner of science. But maybe there's something in a story you're about to tell me that'll kind of get at that.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah, Jad. It's the mumps story.

(LAUGHTER)

MATT KIELTY: The whole reason we're here.

(LAUGHTER)

MATT KIELTY: All right, so...

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, wait. Can I - can you guys hold on one second? I might have to run and get the door.

HEATHER RADKE: OK.

JAD ABUMRAD: I'll be right back.

MATT KIELTY: Sure.

HEATHER RADKE: I'm going to have some water.

MATT KIELTY: It's a good spot for a break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: I can never find the app. Type it in, type it in, type it in.

HEATHER RADKE: (Laughter) You guys have a real - a lot of people who work with you. It's sort of a fun little family here at the end. All hands on deck.

MATT KIELTY: All hands on deck.

HEATHER RADKE: Like we're putting on a play.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JAD ABUMRAD: Jad - RADIOLAB. Back to Heather Radke and Matt Kielty and their story about Maurice Hilleman, aka the father of modern vaccines, aka the vaccine master.

PAUL OFFIT: One other thing - he also was a profane man.

MATT KIELTY: Oh, really?

PAUL OFFIT: Yes.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: There were so many fucking things that could happen.

You didn't hear a goddamn...

They loved this guy. Well, I thought he was a piece of shit.

A fucking ice-cream truck stopped there.

MATT KIELTY: By the way, these are recordings Offit made with Hilleman in order to write a book on him.

PAUL OFFIT: But it was hard in writing the book because often I would have, like, the F word in the same sentence as polymerase chain reaction, which is probably the only time that's ever happened.

(LAUGHTER)

MATT KIELTY: So anyway, in 1957, Hilleman joined the pharmaceutical company Merck to run their vaccine division. And when he got there, pretty quickly the company put him through management training.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Charm school.

MATT KIELTY: Or what he called charm school.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: We couldn't cuss so much, right? So that's bullshit.

MATT KIELTY: At a certain point, he was lectured about creating a more fulfilling work environment for his employees.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Enjoyment was your job. I said, that's a lot of (ph) shit, you know?

PAUL OFFIT: He was a tough guy.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: What the company should be doing is kicking ass.

PAUL OFFIT: And he suffered fools poorly.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: I tell you, the fucking advice that I got from bosses...

MATT KIELTY: In a large part, this is because when Hilleman showed up to Merck, he had this, like, grand vision.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: And my vision was that I wanted to conquer the pediatric diseases of children.

PAUL OFFIT: His goal was to eliminate any viral or bacterial infection that infected children.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox.

PAUL OFFIT: Which was a ridiculous goal. But he came pretty darn close to meeting it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: OK, so let's finally actually go to...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PAUL OFFIT: Yeah, let's go to mumps. You ready to go to mumps?

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Yeah.

MATT KIELTY: ...Mumps.

HEATHER RADKE: All right. Yeah, so let's go back to the very beginning.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: Oh, absolutely.

HEATHER RADKE: This, by the way, is Maurice Hilleman's daughter, Jeryl Lynn Hilleman.

How old were you when you came down with mumps?

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: I believe I was 5.

HEATHER RADKE: Philadelphia, is that right?

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: Outside of Philadelphia, in a suburb outside of Philadelphia.

MATT KIELTY: OK, so it was March 23, 1963.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: It was probably in the middle of the night, very late at night. I'd gone to bed. I woke up. I wasn't feeling well.

MATT KIELTY: So she gets out of bed, goes across the hall.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PAUL OFFIT: So she comes in to you at 1 in the morning?

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Yeah.

MATT KIELTY: Wakes up her dad.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: And she says, my throat hurts.

MATT KIELTY: So the first thing he did is he got out this book.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: Very thick book, maybe 3 or 4 inches thick, hardback.

HEATHER RADKE: A kind of diagnostic book.

MATT KIELTY: He thumbs through it, looks at his daughter.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: I said, holy shit. You got mumps.

PAUL OFFIT: But see - I can't have him cursing in front of a 5-year-old daughter. So I didn't do that. I think I said, oh, goodness - or something like that.

(LAUGHTER)

PAUL OFFIT: And then what he did was something no father does. He laid her back down in bed. Now, there was - his wife had recently died. And so he had a housekeeper who also stayed in the home in the evening. So...

HEATHER RADKE: At 1 in the morning, he got dressed, got in his car, and he drove down to the lab.

PAUL OFFIT: Got a swab, came back, gently woke up his daughter.

HEATHER RADKE: Swabbed the inside of her mouth, and he pulled out a little bit of her mumps virus.

MATT KIELTY: And he said in this interview that he did with Offit...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: This is the time to get a mumps virus strain. Who knows?

MATT KIELTY: Like, at this point, he didn't have a good strain of the mumps virus at Merck. And so he's sort of just like, if an opportunity presents itself...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Take every opportunity.

MATT KIELTY: Get yourself a virus.

HEATHER RADKE: OK, so now he has a sample of the virus, and he's going to try to use Jeryl Lynn's virus to make the vaccine.

JAD ABUMRAD: OK.

HEATHER RADKE: Let's see. So...

(LAUGHTER)

MATT KIELTY: This is - like, this is crazy. It turns out making a vaccine's insane.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah, this is the part where I'm like, OK, demystify it. So what does he do?

MATT KIELTY: So the first thing he does is he puts Jeryl Lynn's mumps virus into this lab flask with a bunch of chicken embryo cells.

JAD ABUMRAD: Why?

MATT KIELTY: Fair question. So, basically, he's going to use these chick cells to transform the virus. So what he does is he has the virus in with these chick cells in a lab flask, and he basically just starts watching the virus grow in these cells. And as it's growing, what it's doing is it's killing cells. That's what a virus does when it grows. And he's looking for clumps of dead cells. And if he sees a flask that has a lot of dead cells, he's like, oh, that one. He takes the virus out of there, plucks it out, puts it into another flask with chick cells, and he's watching to see if it kills even more cells this time. And if it does, he takes it out, puts it into a flask again. And he's just - he's basically trying to get this thing to be better and better at killing chicken cells. And the idea here is...

JAD ABUMRAD: And why - what - and why is - oh, yeah. Sorry. You're about to answer my question, I think. Keep going.

MATT KIELTY: Well, the idea is that by passing it through animal cells, these chicken cells, again and again, what you're doing is you're - essentially, you're weakening the effect of the virus on a human. It's still a virus, and it's still a virus that you can actually then take and put inside of a human. The thing is, it's just not going to cause the same sort of disease that it would if it were, like, really virulent and very strong. It's essentially weakened. This is called attenuation.

JAD ABUMRAD: Interesting.

MATT KIELTY: You're kind of, like, turning down the knob or something, the volume on this virus as you pass it through chickens.

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah, it's like you turn down the...

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, that's so interesting.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Knob on the human virus and up the knob on the chicken virus.

JAD ABUMRAD: And so what is he looking for exactly? Is he looking for a virus that's super good at getting into chicken cells and therefore terrible at human cells? Or is he looking for something else?

HEATHER RADKE: I mean, I think that's sort of the art.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: This is a judgment call.

HEATHER RADKE: Hilleman described it as a judgment call.

PAUL OFFIT: It's guts and judgment. It's just absolute trial and error. I mean, there's no formula for this. This is not written down anywhere. You just try.

HEATHER RADKE: And Offit told us...

PAUL OFFIT: He really just had a sixth sense for how one did that.

HEATHER RADKE: You know, different people would make different choices about that, and he's good at making the right set of choices. So you don't want it so chickeny that humans don't - like, you know, a human body doesn't recognize it at all. But you don't want it human-y (ph) to the point where anybody is going to get sick. And that's the real fear in making a vaccine...

JAD ABUMRAD: I see. I see.

HEATHER RADKE: ...Is that people will get the disease, you know. So...

JAD ABUMRAD: I see. Oh, so you just put your finger on it. So he's looking for a - he's trying to - or attenuate it so that it's right at that perfect fault line between being chicken-y enough that it doesn't hurt the human, but still being human-y enough that the human immune system will recognize it and see it as a threat.

MATT KIELTY: Right.

PAUL OFFIT: Right.

MATT KIELTY: And Paul explained to us that doing this process - because you end up with an actual live virus that is the vaccine that you put into people, you - this process leads to, like, the most robust immune response that a vaccine can create.

PAUL OFFIT: That's the gold standard of vaccines. And that same strategy is being used to make a COVID-19 vaccine, as well.

MATT KIELTY: Oh, really? We still do that?

PAUL OFFIT: We still do that, yep.

HEATHER RADKE: Sometimes, they ask you if you're allergic to eggs when you get a vaccine. That's why.

MATT KIELTY: Oh. Before we leave this part of the process, quick, like, how long did it take him to do this pass-it-through-the-chicken-cell thing?

PAUL OFFIT: It probably took about two years to do that.

MATT KIELTY: Two years?

PAUL OFFIT: That's right.

MATT KIELTY: Which sounds slow, but it's fast.

HEATHER RADKE: Because with COVID, we have hundreds of scientists all over the world, all of the resources they could possibly imagine. And it's taken us at least a year. This is one guy with a couple of lab assistants and a bunch of chicken eggs. So two years is actually pretty fast.

JAD ABUMRAD: Right.

MATT KIELTY: So yeah.

JAD ABUMRAD: All right. So then what?

HEATHER RADKE: So that's just the beginning. So once he has a decent vaccine, he has to do tests on people.

MATT KIELTY: And this part of the process - it's a different thing than growing things in a lab. There's, like, a whole other landscape of questions and judgment calls and risks. Like, the vaccine, if it's not right, can actually just give you mumps.

HEATHER RADKE: And also, when we test vaccines, we're not only testing to make sure that they work and that they won't give you the disease. We're also testing to make sure that there aren't other unknown side effects.

PAUL OFFIT: Yes.

MATT KIELTY: Could you just walk us through what exactly Hilleman's doing in this trial process?

PAUL OFFIT: Sure. So he starts with adults. Then you work your way down to children.

MATT KIELTY: And what he's doing is he's just - he's injecting his vaccine and just being like, do you die, or are you OK?

PAUL OFFIT: Yeah. Well, yeah. Not quite that grim.

MATT KIELTY: (Laughter).

PAUL OFFIT: But yeah, it's just - is it safe, and is it inducing an immune response which is likely to be protective?

MATT KIELTY: OK.

HEATHER RADKE: So you give them the vaccine. You check back in. You draw their blood. And then you look for antibodies.

PAUL OFFIT: Right.

MATT KIELTY: And the thing is, back then, you could do this with a lot of speed.

HEATHER RADKE: Because these are kind of the Wild West days of vaccine-making and research.

PAUL OFFIT: For example, to do a trial...

MATT KIELTY: Offit explained to us, to do a vaccine trial now, you have to sign a 15-page, single-spaced consent form.

PAUL OFFIT: Then, it was a 3x5 card that said, I allow my child to participate in a blank vaccine trial. And you just filled in, you know, mumps, measles, German measles. And then you signed it.

MATT KIELTY: Wow.

PAUL OFFIT: That was the consent form.

HEATHER RADKE: So what Hilleman and his team did is they went to the suburbs...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...Set up studies and Havertown, which is West Philadelphia...

MATT KIELTY: They basically had these community meetings.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...Through the churches, some of the schools.

MATT KIELTY: It would be clergy people, teachers, parents, who were mostly white, middle class. And Hilleman and his team would meet with these people and - in particular with the parents, they would explain to them what the vaccine is, what they hope the vaccine can do and then hand them a 3x5 notecard and ask them...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: ...To volunteer their kids...

HEATHER RADKE: And a lot of them did volunteer.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Thousands of children.

PAUL OFFIT: About 5,000 or so children.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Well, I think it's wonderful that they have this. And I'm thankful my child is participating in it.

MATT KIELTY: I actually found this old documentary from when these tests were being done. And it's just a room full of these kids getting a vaccine shot, crying, and then these mothers...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: I'm here because I feel that if this will help children, this will be a wonderful thing.

MATT KIELTY: ...Explaining why they decided to participate.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: Oh, I hate to see any child suffering. I'm a mother of six, and I'm for anything that can help any child in the world. I'm a mother through and through.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: We owe such a huge debt to the people of that West Philadelphia area. The parents - they had to keep their records at home for what their children - take their temperatures, come in and go through all of this annoying business, bled. They had to be inoculated to participate in what was regarded as a humanitarian quest. Boy, I will never forget that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HEATHER RADKE: Now, as Hilleman was conducting these tests on children who had been volunteered by their parents, he was actually also testing the mumps vaccine on another group of children - children who were living in state homes and had intellectual disabilities.

MATT KIELTY: They were essentially volunteered by the state.

HEATHER RADKE: So until the law changed in the early '70s, this is how a lot of drugs and particularly vaccines were tested.

MATT KIELTY: And this is actually something that comes up in Offit's interviews with Hilleman.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: It was a big ethical issue. I worried about that like, you know, hell, you know? I think we have a hell of a responsibility. And what are the ethical standards that we're using and following?

MATT KIELTY: And Hilleman says at the time, the two sort of guiding ideas were...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Do no harm.

MATT KIELTY: Do no harm.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: And do good.

MATT KIELTY: And do good.

PAUL OFFIT: In those days, in the 1960s, the thinking at the time - when you were in these chronic care, long-term facilities, the level of hygiene and sanitation in those areas was terrible.

MATT KIELTY: It was crowded. Disease was rampant.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Yeah, well, they all developed epidemic disease, these institutionalized kids.

MATT KIELTY: So the justification at the time was that because these kids were the most likely to get these diseases, they were also the most likely to benefit from the vaccine.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: But I'm telling you, these were judgment calls, scientifically and ethically. There is no question about it.

HEATHER RADKE: What Hilleman was doing - testing his vaccine on children with intellectual disabilities in state homes - was part of a bigger thing that was happening all over the place across the country. And a lot of kids got sick, and some even died. There was a situation in Staten Island where a group of kids were given live hepatitis. Another situation in Massachusetts were a group of children at a state home were given radiation, were just exposed to tons of radiation. And although what Hilleman was doing wasn't that, he was part of a system where children who were under the care of the state were used for scientific experimentation.

JAD ABUMRAD: Right. Well, did - before we leave this point, did anyone protest to or about Hilleman in the moment? Or was it just so commonplace that people didn't think anything of it?

HEATHER RADKE: No, they didn't. And it was very commonplace. And nobody got sick because the vaccine worked.

So in 1967, four years after he'd swabbed Jeryl Lynn's throat, Hilleman had made his mumps vaccine. It was the fastest anyone had ever made a vaccine from start to finish.

MATT KIELTY: And we'll say quick that Hilleman seemed pretty tickled that...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PAUL OFFIT: This was her virus.

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Oh, yeah. My God, that's your virus.

MATT KIELTY: ...He got to name it after his daughter.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Can you imagine that?

HEATHER RADKE: Called the Jeryl Lynn strain. It still is.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: And he thought that was a nice thing. But it wasn't. Something that is just one of those facts of life (laughter).

MATT KIELTY: Jeryl Lynn told us, after he was done with mumps, he was just off to the next thing.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: And, you know, he carried around a list at times.

MATT KIELTY: This list he kept in his pocket.

JERYL LYNN HILLEMAN: List of diseases that still had yet to be conquered. And I think it was a reminder that, you know, for him, his work would never be done.

PAUL OFFIT: And what - he would say this. He would say it was like putting up a fence. And, you know, then you take a break and, you know, everybody gathers around, and they drink from - you know, from this bucket of water, and they pass the ladle around. And then you're done, and then you go back to doing it again. He was never, ever satisfied.

MATT KIELTY: Well, so after mumps, it was measles.

HEATHER RADKE: And with measles, there's actually already a vaccine in existence.

PAUL OFFIT: And, I mean, that vaccine worked. But it wasn't quite attenuated enough.

HEATHER RADKE: Like, it wasn't weak enough, so you would have to get another shot at the same time in your other arm so you didn't get sick.

PAUL OFFIT: Maurice then just took that virus and very quickly attenuated it so that it was perfect. That virus bounces off you. It's a remarkable vaccine. And so we eliminated measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, because it was so incredibly effective.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow. Damn.

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah. So here's - so this is a...

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah, you got a list?

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah, it's a - this is vaccines that Hilleman developed.

JAD ABUMRAD: OK.

HEATHER RADKE: OK, so chicken pox.

JAD ABUMRAD: Chicken pox.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah.

HEATHER RADKE: Yeah, chicken pox was a late latecomer.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

HEATHER RADKE: So chicken pox, adenovirus, measles, mumps, rubella - which he combined into the MMR vaccine that we all get - Japanese encephalitis, meningococcus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, pneumococcus, Haemophilus influenzae type B and then others.

JAD ABUMRAD: Damn.

MATT KIELTY: By the end of his career, he developed over 40 vaccines.

JAD ABUMRAD: Forty?

HEATHER RADKE: Including eight of the 14 that we all get as children.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAURICE HILLEMAN: Well, looking back on one's lifetime, you'll say, gee, what have I done? Have I done enough for the world to justify having been here, you know? That's a big worry to people from Montana, at least. And I would say I'm kind of pleased about all this. I'm not smug about it, but I'm pleased because there's a great joy in being useful. And that's the satisfaction that you get out of it.

MATT KIELTY: And just to, quick, give you, like, context to Hilleman's work, Paul actually helped to create one of the 14 vaccines we get as kids.

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, really?

MATT KIELTY: Yeah. And it took him 26 years. So he says when he first learned about Hilleman and what all he had accomplished...

PAUL OFFIT: It was like trying to imagine another universe.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PAUL OFFIT: But he was humble. As rough as he was and as crude as he could be (laughter) and how - as profane as he could be, he was a humble man. He never promoted himself. So he just always flew below the radar, remarkably enough, given his accomplishments. I honestly think he was the single most-accomplished scientist in history. And when he died, I was at a - I gave a talk at the University of Pittsburgh. His son-in-law called me to say that he had passed away. And then after I heard that news, I walked in among a group of 35 to 50 pediatricians and say, you know, here's this man, Maurice Hilleman, who just passed away. No one heard of him. No one - zero. And these are pediatricians who give his vaccines.

MATT KIELTY: Did that surprise you in that moment?

PAUL OFFIT: Yeah. Yes, it did.

MATT KIELTY: Did it sadden you?

PAUL OFFIT: Yes.

HEATHER RADKE: Do you think his humility, which is - you're saying is part of the reason we don't remember him, is also part of what made him good at his job?

PAUL OFFIT: In some ways, I think - he was never stopping to take a bow. But to be honest, I think it's all wrong. I mean, I think no one should be taking bows. I mean, I really - every time a CEO opens his mouth, I really shudder to hear what they say because they're always beating their chest about how quickly they're doing this and how well it's going.

HEATHER RADKE: Paul was talking about some of the CEOs who are at the companies who are at the forefront of manufacturing the COVID vaccine. And when he says he shudders, it's not just because of all the ways the development of the vaccine could go wrong, but also because it seems like they're not really recognizing the cost even when it goes right.

PAUL OFFIT: Because there has never been a medical breakthrough in history that has not been associated with a price. When Thomas Francis did the polio field trial in the mid-1950s, Jonas Salk had made his vaccine, but he didn't know whether it worked or not. So they chose to do a big field trial. Four hundred and twenty thousand children were given his vaccine over a year period funded by the March of Dimes. Two hundred thousand were given placebo - first- and second-graders throughout the country. And then after it was over, Thomas Francis stood up on the podium at Rackham Hall at the University of Michigan and said, safe, potent and effective. That's what he said. Those three words were the headline of every major newspaper in this country. I mean, church bells rang. Synagogues and churches held special prayer meetings. Department stores stopped. Trials stopped, you know, so the judges could hear that announcement. It was announced over the Voice of America.

Well, the question is, how do we know that it worked? We knew that it worked because 16 children in that study died from polio, all in the placebo group. Thirty-six children were permanently paralyzed, 34 in the placebo group. But for the flip of a coin, those children could have been alive and well today. Those were first- and second-graders in the 1950s. I was a first- and second-grader in the 1950s. I mean, those people suffered or died because they just happened to be in the control group. That's what knowledge takes. And that was - that statistic never really rang. I mean, we were so busy celebrating that that I think we didn't really stop and take a look at just how one comes to acquire knowledge.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah, I just came across this quote from Jonas Salk, who sent a letter to a man named O'Connor, who - I don't know who O'Connor is or was.

PAUL OFFIT: He headed the March of Dimes program.

MATT KIELTY: OK. And Salk wrote, I would feel that every child who is injected with a placebo and becomes paralyzed will do so at my hands.

PAUL OFFIT: That's right. That's what I was alluding to.

MATT KIELTY: And that those who argued - those demanding a placebo-controlled trial, he argued, took the position in order to reach a statistical endpoint because, quote, "values in which the worship of science involves the sacrifice of humanitarian principles on the altar of rigid methodology," end quote.

PAUL OFFIT: Yeah, that's good. Yeah. No, I think Jonas Salk was always heartbroken when that trial was done because he knew that there would be children who would intentionally not be given the vaccine. I mean, the one thing is to say, as you roll out a vaccine - like the Ebola vaccine, when it rolled out into West Africa, not everybody got it at once. And so some people got it, some people didn't, and some of the people who didn't get it obviously weren't saved.

But it's different than when you actually purposefully don't give a vaccine for a period of a year. You're making the choice. You're asking a child to participate in something, and you know that half of them, half of those children, aren't going to be getting the vaccine. It just feels different. You're actually doing a trial where you know there are children who may die and be paralyzed in that other half because they haven't gotten the vaccine. And the truth be told, that's the only way you're going to know that.

HEATHER RADKE: And Paul told us that this is actually what's happening with COVID now. A while back - I don't know if you remember this - but there was a guy in Brazil who was part of a COVID trial who died.

PAUL OFFIT: You know, we all held our breath to see whether the person was in the placebo group or the vaccine group. And everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the person was in the placebo group because now you know that the vaccine didn't kill them.

HEATHER RADKE: But now what you know is that COVID killed him.

PAUL OFFIT: And had he been in the other group, he probably wouldn't have died. I'm just saying you're constructing an experiment where, by definition, you're not going to learn unless people suffer or hospitalize or die. That's the experiment you're conducting.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MATT KIELTY: There seemingly always is some sort of cost, and someone gets sacrificed to progress. And there's a question of who bears the burden of that sacrifice, and I think oftentimes it's marginalized communities. But yet, inevitably, there - like, blood is sort of shed, is what it feels like.

PAUL OFFIT: Always.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JAD ABUMRAD: Reporters Heather Radke and Matt Kielty.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE GOT THE MUMPS")

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) I ain't been to school now for almost a week, I got a big lump on my left-hand cheek. Teacher said not to come back again till the doctor made it better. Ma said, oh, what ails my child? His face is full of lumps. And Pa looked at me and said, oh, bejebs (ph), our angel has the mumps. I've got the mumps. I've got the mumps. Ma gave me...

MATT KIELTY: (Singing) And don't tell Pa...

OK, special thanks to - well, a huge special thanks to Donald Mitchell, the filmmaker who passed us a lot of this audio of Maurice Hilleman. His movie is called "Hilleman: A Perilous Quest To Save The World's Children." You can watch the film online or parts of it at The Vaccine Makers Project. Also to Elaine Icanus (ph) and to Anna Vichuk (ph) and Andrew Backer (ph), who performed this lovely rendition...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE GOT THE MUMPS")

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) I said I've got the mumps.

MATT KIELTY: ...Of the "Mumps" sheet music Heather found.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'VE GOT THE MUMPS")

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) Don't get up for breakfast till it's nearly 10. For a nickel, I'll rub up again you, and then you have the mumps.

MATT KIELTY: All right. That's it for me. Jad?

JAD ABUMRAD: OK. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thank you all for listening.

STEPHEN: Hi. This is Stephen (ph) phoning from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. RADIOLAB was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. And Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Tobin Low, Annie McEwen, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliaee, Sarah Sandbach and Jonny Moens. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.