London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

In 1797, a Gloucestershire surgeon called Edward Jenner protected a small boy from smallpox by inoculating him with cowpox. In 1977, nearly two centuries after that first ‘vaccination’, a hospital cook called Ali Maow Maalin recovered from the last natural smallpox infection. Thanks to Jenner’s insight, we no longer live with smallpox. By then, it was clear that Jenner’s insight was merely the beginning.

During the 1870s, Louis Pasteur led a revolution in medical science by showing that microbes cause disease. He didn’t stop there; he went on to modify microbes to protect against disease. He had turned the phenomenon discovered by Jenner into a set of principles and those principles have underpinned vaccine development for the last century and a half. We now have an array of vaccines produced by techniques that Jenner and Pasteur could never have dreamed of and as microbes are constantly evolving, so must vaccinology.

This is the story of how the pioneers of vaccinology established the principles that underpin today’s vaccine technology.

Join us for this seminar as part of the LSHTM Vaccine Centres World Immunisation Week programme.

Speaker 

David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who has worked on vaccine-preventable diseases. He is a Distance Learning Tutor and Module Organiser at LSHTM. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023.

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