Talk:Stanley Plotkin
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Quote " In 1964 and 1965, rubella exploded. There were 12.5 million infections here, which gave rise to 20,000 cases of the congenital syndrome, about 6,200 stillbirths, and at least 5,000 abortions -- some legal and some not. The epidemic also gave a great push to Stanley Plotkin, a research physician at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, who had begun working on a rubella vaccine in 1963.
Plotkin subjected a strain of rubella virus to repeated rounds of growth in harsh conditions in tissue culture. This caused genetic changes that rendered the microbe too weak to cause illness yet still capable of stimulating immunity.
His final product proved unusually effective and safe. A single dose confers life-long immunity in nearly all people. Among the thousands of women who turned out to be pregnant when they got the vaccine over the years, none has ever had a baby with congenital rubella.
Now 72 and an adviser to the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi Pasteur, Plotkin recalled last week that opponents of abortion briefly questioned whether it was ethical to use the vaccine, because it was developed with virus isolated from an infected fetus that had been legally aborted in Pennsylvania in 1965. Roman Catholic authorities, however, pronounced it acceptable. " [1]
Just inducted to the Institute of Medicine. 2005
