Leonard Hayflick as a young man (right) with his friend Norman Cohen.

The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology soon after Hilary Koprowski took over in 1957. The building on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia dates to 1894.

I.S. Ravdin, surgeon-in-chief at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 1959. Ravdin made it possible for Hayflick to obtain aborted fetuses from the hospital.

Leonard Hayflick examines normal human fetal cells in the lab at The Wistar Institute, circa 1960.

A microscopic view of young WI-38 cells—fibroblasts from the lungs of a Swedish fetus aborted in 1962. The oblong shapes are cell nuclei. The long, tapered cell bodies are much lighter. The very dark clumps (center near the bottom) are the chromosomes of a cell preparing to divide.

Old, or “senescent,” WI-38 cells, which have stopped dividing and have lost their slender, compass-needle shapes. Their nuclei are stained with a dye that selectively stains senescent cells.

Sven Gard with assistants Eva Olsson (left) and Brita Moberg examining baby mice infected with Coxsackie virus in Gard’s Karolinska Institute lab, 1952.

Eva Herrström, Gard’s chief lab technician, examines tissue cultures infected with polio virus in the Gard lab, 1955.

Swedish physician and epidemiologist Margareta Böttiger, circa 1962. Böttiger was enlisted to track down the medical history of the Swedish woman whose abortion gave rise to WI-38 cells.

Swedish gynecologist Eva Ernholm around the time that she performed the WI-38 abortion in 1962. Ernholm loved fast cars and adventure but was cautious when it came to performing abortions.

Young WI-38 cells were stored for freezing in these ampules on July 31, 1962.

NIH polio safety scientist Bernice Eddy (left) pictured with her colleague Sarah Stewart, in the 1950s. Eddy was demoted after she discovered—and spoke openly about—a cancer-causing virus in the monkey kidney cells used to make polio vaccine.

While the issue was ignored by the mainstream press, the National Enquirer reported prominently on the silent, cancer-causing monkey virus that scientists later estimated contaminated tens of millions of doses of the Salk polio vaccine. This cover story appeared on August 20, 1961.

The nineteen-year-old Jim Poupard gave premature babies at Philadelphia General Hospital experimental polio vaccines made with human fetal lung cells while working for Hilary Koprowski at The Wistar Institute in 1962. He is pictured during his medical technician training in 1961.

The new Philadelphia General Hospital Premature Infant Nursery in 1956. African American women trusted the hospital and 94 percent of babies born there in 1960 were black. The hospital’s senior pediatrician permitted The Wistar Institute scientists to use the babies for polio vaccine trials.

Philadelphia General Hospital, circa 1964. The hospital served mainly African Americans. The black wall that separated PGH from the University of Pennsylvania is visible in the foreground.

Roderick Murray led the National Institutes of Health division that approved vaccines for the U.S. market from 1955 until 1972. For a decade after Hayflick derived the WI-38 cells in 1962, Murray refused to approve vaccines made using them.

The Pfizer polio vaccine made in Hayflick’s WI-38 cells won FDA approval in 1972, ten years after the cells became available. Supply shortages and a campaign by Lederle Laboratories to sow distrust in the vaccine led Pfizer to withdraw it from the U.S. market in 1976.

Sir Norman McAlister Gregg, the Australian ophthalmologist who discovered that rubella damages fetuses. Gregg listened deeply to patients, leading to his classic 1941 finding.

Rubella virus particles in a space between two cells, as seen through an electron microscope. On the left, particles are budding from the surface of a cell. When a cell is invaded, the virus co-opts the cell’s machinery to make many more viruses.

Stanley Plotkin uses a pipette to transfer rubella virus at The Wistar Institute, circa 1965. Today most pipettes are operated by thumb-controlled pistons, much like syringes.

Stephen Wenzler as a child, circa 1972. Stephen’s mother, Mary, had rubella early in her pregnancy. Stephen was born blinded by cataracts and profoundly deaf. His heart was also damaged by the virus.

St. Vincent’s Home for Children in 1971. Stanley Plotkin tested his rubella vaccine on children at the home from 1964 to 1967, with the approval of John Joseph Krol, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia. The Home was owned by the archdiocese and staffed by the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood.

Maurice Hilleman (left) with colleague Eugene Buynak, injecting a duck with rubella in the late 1960s. Unlike Plotkin’s human-cell-propagated vaccine, Merck’s first rubella vaccine was made in duck embryo cells.

A March of Dimes poster in 1970 invoked medical authority and fear to urge people to get vaccinated against rubella with the new vaccines.

This government-sponsored billboard was part of a campaign to immunize millions with the newly approved rubella vaccines, before an epidemic that was expected as soon as 1970.

Dorothy Horstmann, a Yale University pediatrician, challenged the effectiveness of the rubella vaccines that were licensed in 1969 and 1970. She finally persuaded Merck’s Maurice Hilleman to switch to Plotkin’s superior vaccine.

Stanley Plotkin in his office at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, circa 1979. His rubella vaccine, made in WI-38 cells by Merck, was approved by the FDA in 1978.

Merck’s new rubella vaccine as it entered the U.S. market in January, 1979. The box notes the use of Stanley Plotkin’s RA 27/3 rubella virus strain and its production in the WI-38 cells derived by Leonard Hayflick.

Leonard Hayflick at Stanford circa 1975, the year that the National Institutes of Health investigated his stewardship of the WI-38 cells.

James Schriver headed the Division of Management Survey and Review, the NIH’s internal auditing office. Early in 1976, he issued a damning report on Hayflick’s handling and selling of the WI-38 cells.

Anna MacConnell at eighteen months old in 2002. Scarring of her windpipe after open-heart surgery meant that she had to breathe through a tube until she was three years old. Anna was deaf, blind, and had a four-part heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot. Her mother had rubella while pregnant.

In 2004, the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults marked the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 rubella epidemic with a poster featuring Stephen Wenzler. It urged employers to hire those whom the epidemic left deaf and blind.

Bullet-shaped rabies virus particles are shown here magnified about 70,000 times with an electron microscope. Beginning in 1962, Hilary Koprowski and Tadeusz Wiktor used Hayflick’s WI-38 cells to develop a much-improved rabies vaccine.

Hilary Koprowski being “vaccinated” by Stanley Plotkin (left) during the first human trial of The Wistar Institute’s WI-38-propagated rabies vaccine in 1971. The actual vaccination happened moments earlier. This one was for the camera. The vaccine’s co-inventor, Tadeusz Wiktor, is “restraining” Koprowski.

Stanley Plotkin at age eighty, in 2012. “I am fond of saying that rubella vaccine has prevented thousands more abortions than have ever been prevented by Catholic religionists,” he says. Today, Plotkin consults for vaccine companies and nonprofits and writes frequent articles urging countries to establish an international fund for vaccine development.

Leonard Hayflick and his wife, Ruth, at home in the Sea Ranch, California, in 2013. Hayflick kept a liquid nitrogen refrigerator of WI-38 cells in his garage on bluffs above the Pacific until 2006, when he donated the cells to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. “It was time,” he told Nature, “that my children—now adults—should leave home.”