Proteomic Applications in Vaccine Development

Controversy surrounding vaccines is not new; the first vaccine proven to be effective in preventing disease was subjected to wild rumors ( https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination ). In 1796 Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps with pus from a cowpox sore taken from the hand of Sarah Nelmes (see Fig. 10.1). While 8-year-old James fell ill with a mild case of cowpox, he eventually recovered. Poor James was not yet free from his life as a "lab rat," as Dr. Jenner later inoculated him with pus taken from an individual suffering with smallpox. Fortunately for James, he was unaffected by this inoculation and shown to be resistant to human smallpox. While Jenner's vaccine proved to be effective in preventing smallpox infection, many people were opposed to this remedy. Some ill-informed Church members believed that suffering from smallpox was part of God's judgment for man and attempting to use a vaccine against it was subverting God's will ( https://www.jenner.ac.uk/about/edward-jenner ). Another controversy may have been self-inflicted as Jenner named this novel technique "vaccination," which originated from vacca, the Latin word for "cow." This word association caused some people to believe the vaccine worked by giving people an animal disease or even turned them into or gave them certain characteristics of a cow. In addition, Jenner could not completely explain how the smallpox vaccine worked as it would be another 50 years before Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease.