Story
Rachel Schneerson was born in Warsaw and made her scientific life in Israel and then at the National Institutes of Health. She is a Jewish immunologist of the quiet school: the paper, the conjugate, the child who does not appear in the hospital log.
With John B. Robbins she spent years joining bacterial polysaccharides to proteins so infant immune systems would respond. Hib was the famous success. The method traveled to other vaccines. She kept working on the next sugar, the next protein, the next neglected infection.
Honors arrived from academies that had finally learned her name. She did not rebrand herself as a public scientist. The lab was the point, and the collaboration was the method.
A Warsaw-born woman in a Bethesda corridor is a Jewish twentieth-century plot with a better last chapter than most. The accomplishment is a vaccine schedule and a set of empty isolation rooms.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Wikimedia Commons
