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October 2024 – Didcot Cafe Scientifique, David Miles – The History of Vaccines
15th October 2024 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Talk from David Miles – The History of Vaccines
Tuesday 15th October, Cornerstone Arts Centre
A brief history of vaccines: from cowpox to covid
In 1797, a Gloucestershire surgeon called Edward Jenner inoculated a small boy with the cowpox virus to protect him from smallpox. 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 induce protection without causing the 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 vaccinology’s evolution from a Gloucestershire barnyard to the cutting-edge biotechnology that brings COVID-19 to the high street pharmacy.
Bio
David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who has worked mostly on diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. He now lives in London and tutors on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s online MSc course. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, will be published in March 2023.
Website: https://www.variolator.com/
Twitter: @Variolator
Bluesky: @variolator.bsky.social