Maurice R. Hilleman remembered

May 2005

On March 11, physicians from across the country gathered in an auditorium to listen to the Jeryl Lynn Hilleman Endowed Lecture, the focus of which was the fact that the United States had just announced the eradication of rubella.

The lecture, bearing the name of Maurice R. Hilleman’s daughter, Jeryl Lynn, was an appropriate tribute to Hilleman’s work. He, after all, was the one who helped invent the rubella vaccine in the first place, along with the mumps vaccine — which is based on his daughter’s virus — and about 40 others during his lifetime.

Less than two months after that lecture, however, Merck officials announced that Hilleman had died. He was 85.

Philip Brunell, MD, Infectious Diseases in Children’s Chief Medical Editor, recalled Hilleman as a “giant among giants, both physically and intellectually.”

Hilleman worked as an investigator and consultant for Merck Vaccines for almost 50 years.

Adel A. F. Mahmoud, MD, PhD, president of Merck Vaccines, said Hilleman’s work “has helped to protect millions from diseases ranging from pandemic influenza to chickenpox, and has revolutionized public health, without question. There are few people alive today — or who have lived in any other age in history — who can say that they helped eliminate a disease and saved millions of lives, not just through their discovery, but through their insistence that the fruits of their labor be brought to all those in need. Maurice Hilleman is one of those very few.”

Hilleman joined Merck in 1957, as director of a new department of virus and cell biology research, and retired from Merck in 1984 as senior vice president.

Before joining Merck, Hilleman was chief of the department of respiratory diseases at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Washington. In his youth, he worked on a farm in Montana. It was these early roots in farming that he credited his success in working with vaccines, growing virus in the cells of chicken embryos.

Brunell said that everyone that knew Hilleman was aware of his “western openness and candor.” He said his frankness “may have been disarming to some, but to those who knew him he was remarkably insightful and one who usually called them right. Merck’s success in the vaccine business can be attributed mainly to Maurice’s leadership.”

At the time of his death, Hilleman was adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hilleman received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1944.

Hilleman published more than 500 original articles in the fields of virology, immunology, epidemiology and infectious diseases.

He served on numerous national and international advisory boards and committees, academic, governmental and private. These included the National Institutes of Health’s Office of AIDS Research Program Evaluation and the National Vaccine Advisory Committee of the National Vaccine Program. He was been a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of WHO since 1952.