In the US during the late 1960s, Stanley Alan Plotkin, John D. Farquhar, Michael Katz, and Fritz Buser isolated a strain of the infectious disease rubella and developed a rubella vaccine with a weakened, or attenuated, version of the virus strain. Rubella, also called German measles, is a highly contagious disease caused by the rubella virus that generally causes mild rashes and fever. However, in pregnant women, rubella infections can lead to developmental defects in their fetuses. Plotkin and his collaborators weakened a strain of rubella, called RA 27/3, by growing the virus in WI-38 cells, a strain of human embryonic cells developed at the Wistar Institute by Leonard Hayflick in the early 1960s. Their research led to the development of a rubella vaccine, which prevented rubella in children and congenital rubella syndrome in the fetuses of pregnant women who had contracted rubella.

Stanley Alan Plotkin developed vaccines in the United States during the mid to late twentieth century. Plotkin began his research career at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he studied the rubella virus. In pregnant women, the rubella virus caused congenital rubella syndrome in the fetus, which led to various malformations and birth defects. Using WI-38 cells, a line of cells that originated from tissues of aborted fetuses, Plotkin successfully created RA27/3, a weakened strain of the rubella virus, which he then used to develop a rubella vaccine. Plotkin’s rubella vaccine has prevented birth defects due to congenital rubella in developing fetuses and newborns.

From 1958 to 1961, Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead in the US developed a way in the laboratory to cultivate strains of human cells with complete sets of chromosomes. Previously, scientists could not sustain cell cultures with cells that had two complete sets of chromosomes like normal human cells (diploid). As a result, scientists struggled to study human cell biology because there was not a reliable source of cells that represented diploid human cells. In their experiments, Hayflick and Moorhead created lasting strains of human cells that retained both complete sets of chromosomes. They then froze samples from the cultures so that the cells remained viable for future research. They also noted that cells could divide only a certain number of times before they degraded and died, a phenomenon later called the Hayflick limit. Hayflick and Moorhead’s experiment enabled research on developmental biology and vaccines that relied on human cell strains.

Leonard Hayflick studied the processes by which cells age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. In 1961 at the Wistar Institute in the US, Hayflick researched a phenomenon later called the Hayflick Limit, or the claim that normal human cells can only divide forty to sixty times before they cannot divide any further. Researchers later found that the cause of the Hayflick Limit is the shortening of telomeres, or portions of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that slowly degrade as cells replicate. Hayflick used his research on normal embryonic cells to develop a vaccine for polio, and from HayflickÕs published directions, scientists developed vaccines for rubella, rabies, adenovirus, measles, chickenpox and shingles.