The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman

The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman

Author:Meredith Wadman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-24T13:09:52+00:00


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Cell Wars

Stanford, California, June 1968–December 1969

The entire history of our development of the human diploid cell strains is a litany of failures, disappointments, misunderstandings, and, finally, law suits. Yet, it is not without humor.

Leonard Hayflick, 19841

When Hayflick arrived at Stanford in the summer of 1968, he had neither house nor lab. The family rented a temporary home near the campus fraternity houses. There they waited for fifteen months while a new, boxy house of yellow ocher was built just for them on a quiet enclave called Mears Court, in the comfortable neighborhood that students ironically call the Faculty Ghetto. It had five bedrooms, and even a small study for Hayflick. There were almond trees in the yard and a magnolia with huge white blossoms that was spectacular in the spring.

As for the precious trove of original WI-38 cells, Hayflick recalls leaving them, while he waited for his lab to get up and running, with a highly qualified friend and colleague, Walter Nelson-Rees, who helped run the cell-culture facility at the Naval Biological Laboratory across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland. (Hayflick also remembers that a Nelson-Rees lab technician thawed and expanded several of the WI-38 ampules without permission, just out of curiosity, setting Hayflick’s teeth on edge when he learned of the loss.)

After the cold, gray winters and humid summers of Philadelphia, Stanford made for a welcome change. Eleven-year-old Joel admired the limpid light. Ruth, who had been looking forward to living in California, found that the bucolic campus, with its red tile roofs and sandstone masonry, its fragrant eucalyptus and its legions of tanned, bike-riding undergraduates, didn’t disappoint. The faculty wives were friendly. She learned that, as a spouse, she could attend classes. She enrolled in a biology course and met a friend who, like her, was an artist. Soon she was grabbing what time she could as a mother of five young children to attend the Palo Alto Art Club and to use the printmaking press in her new friend’s garage.

For an ambitious biologist like Hayflick, Stanford could hardly fail to be a draw. Joshua Lederberg had founded the Department of Genetics a decade earlier, just after winning a Nobel Prize for discovering how bacteria transfer genes. Arthur Kornberg in the Department of Biochemistry had won a Nobel in 1959 for elucidating how DNA is built. His biochemistry colleague Paul Berg, who would soon take over from Kornberg as chair of the department, would win a Nobel in 1980 for being the first to splice genes from different organisms together. The trio of “Bergs” made Stanford a mecca at a time when the frontiers of biology were expanding in thrilling ways.

Admittedly, Stanford’s Department of Medical Microbiology, where Hayflick became a professor, was not on a par with the Bergs’ dominions. Even before accepting the job, Hayflick knew that the department was a backwater, a fact reflected by its quarters in a remnant of the old museum that had been two thirds destroyed in the huge 1906 earthquake. But that left plenty of room for him to blaze a path of his own.



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