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Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner's 1796 test on one boy, cowpox then a smallpox challenge that produced no infection, took nearly two centuries of further engineering to become the only disease eradication in human history.
Vaccines
The intervention that saved the most lives and gets the least credit.
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science.briefs Science
All 5 in science →video still
Smallpox vaccine
1798
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BCG vaccine
Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin spent thirteen years weakening a tuberculosis strain into the BCG vaccine, first given to a child in 1921, whose protection has since proved real but strikingly inconsistent from one country to the next.
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MMR vaccine and autism
A 1998 study of twelve children claiming a link between MMR vaccine and autism took thirteen years to be formally called fraud, and vaccination rates and measles cases moved in step the whole time.
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Rabies vaccine
In July 1885 Louis Pasteur gave an unlicensed, ethically fraught treatment to a bitten nine-year-old, having claimed far more animal testing than his own lab notebooks later showed he had actually done.