Veteran medical journalist Meredith Wadman discuses her book The Vaccine Race. It tells the timely, epic, and controversial story of the development of the first widely-used normal human cell line and, through it, important viral vaccines, including the vaccine for rubella (German measles). Far from being an instrument of history, vaccine development in the modern era is targeting new (and reemerging) infectious diseases, including Ebola, Zika, Influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). Dr. April Killikelly, a scientist at NIH's Vaccine Research Center, discusses the latest tools and technologies used to design tomorrow’s vaccines.

About the Speakers

Meredith K. Wadman, B.M., B.Ch., M.Sc. Staff Writer, Science

Meredith Wadman is a neuroscience reporter at Science magazine in Washington, D.C. Before joining Science, Wadman was an editorial fellow at New America, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Prior to that, she was a reporter covering the medical research community for Nature for 17 years. She has also written on biotech and on biomedical policy issues for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Fortune magazine. Wadman is a graduate of Stanford University and completed medical school at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also earned a master's degree at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University.

April Killikelly, PhD Postdoctoral Fellow, Vaccine Research Center, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health

Dr. Killikelly is a Postdoctoral fellow working on a vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) with Dr. Barney Graham at the Vaccine Research Center (NIAID/VRC). April is also a special volunteer with the Outreach and Education office of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She is passionate about using outreach and education to place science in the broader context of culture and as drivers for societal change.