The Vaccine Race: The Limits of Leonard Hayflick and the WI-38 Cell Line.

I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Meredith Wadman's book, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, which does a deep dive into the early history of cell culture and the development of vaccines for polio, rubella, and rabies. Wadman started researching this story for a piece in Nature in 2013 (I liked it so much that it is near the top of my list of great science blog posts.) Thus, the book is a well-researched and scientifically detailed account of how many lives have been saved and improved by these scientific advances. It also describes, with unflinching honesty, the sometimes questionable practices of researchers and doctors in the time before informed consent and clinical trial review boards. Like Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it is an important look at the history of medical ethics. The Vaccine Race also emphasizes why we need funding for basic research and details the beginning of intellectual property law in biomedical research.


While the book focuses on the scientific development of vaccines, Leonard Hayflick is still at the center of the action. Hayflick, an early practitioner of tissue culture, was interested in developing a normal diploid human cell line. Other cell lines in use at the time were either non-human or from cancer cells. The source of his cell lines were human fetuses obtained from legal abortions. In developing the normal diploid cell lines, he observed that the cells could not grow and replicate forever, but typically replicated only 40-60 times.This result contradicted the famous experiment of Alexis Carrel, whose normal chicken heart cells were continuously cultivated in the lab for 34 years. The Carrel result was considered dogma and so Hayflick's findings were initially met with skepticism and suggestions that Hayflick must not be culturing the cells properly. After increasingly careful repetitions with the same result, he performed a co-culture experiment using young cells from a female and old cells from a male, which showed that the cells died after 40-60 replications no matter when they were added to the culture. He finally convincing the scientific community of the existence of the Hayflick limit. Carrel's result was then called into question. Many years later, Carrel's former lab technician confirmed that the method of preparing the fresh culture media was constantly adding new, young cells to the supposedly elderly cells, allowing them to appear to grow immortally.

Images of WI-38 cells from ATCC; listed as diploid human fetal lung fibroblasts.

After 38 attempts, he found success with a cell line named WI-38 (WI for Wistar Institute), which could proliferate without problem and be infected with virus and continue to replicate. Once he had a reliable cell line, Hayflick then had to convince others of its efficacy and safety for vaccine development. The cell line was eventually used to develop vaccines for adenovirus, MMR, and chickenpox. (Of course, when the source of the cells became known, there was a backlash from religious groups who thought that there was no excuse for using fetal cells.)

The other major battle that Hayflick fought was with the NIH, who had given him a contract to distribute the cells to researchers working on certain NIH grants. When he left the Wistar Institute in 1968, he took the cells with him to his new lab at Stanford. Over the next 8 years, he distributed the WI-38 cells, first at prices similar to those of commercial distributors (like ATCC) and then at increasingly high prices, charging even more for young cells at low passage numbers. In 1974, Hayflick  interviewed for a position as director of the Institute of Aging; this spurred an investigation of his management and practices of the cell line. Eventually, Hayflick resigned from Stanford and hired a young lawyer whose expertise was intellectual copyright; this lawyer later represented many of Silicon Valley's biggest players, like Apple and Facebook. Hayflick was fighting a battle with the NIH that had little precedent. Wadman uses the WI-38 case to describe the advent of intellectual property and biological patent law and how these helped spurred the success of the biotech industry. These chapters were among the most interesting. 

Leonard Hayflick proudly displays his cell line.

The book includes some pretty harrowing details of clinical trials with early vaccines that were given to patients in mental wards, babies born in public hospitals where the majority of patients were African American, inmates in prisons whose release was tied to their participation, members of the US military, and terminal cancer patients – all without informed consent. In most cases, the vaccines behaved as expected and side effects were minimal or nonexistent, but there were exceptions. These cases led Henry Beecher (an anesthesia specialist at Harvard Medical School) to publish an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Ethics and Clinical Research" which detailed the specifics of the questionable human experiments. After Beecher's article, the tide started to change.

Overall, The Vaccine Race is an excellent read, particularly for its coverage of the history of science and medical ethics. If I had one complaint it would be that it was not as detailed about the science of viruses and vaccines, but Wadman does end on a strong, scientific note as she describes the Nobel-prize winning discovery of the enzyme telomerase, which explains the mechanistic basis of the phenomenon observed by Leonard Hayflick.