Vaccines

In 1796 Edward Jenner tested whether cowpox could protect against smallpox, and the vaccination method that followed eventually let the World Health Organization declare smallpox eradicated in 1980.

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.

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.

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.