<b>"A real jewel of science history...brims with suspense and now-forgotten catastrophe and intrigue...Wadman’s smooth prose calmly spins a surpassingly complicated story into a real tour de force."<i><b>—The New York Times</b></i><br><br>“Riveting . . . [<i>The Vaccine Race</i>] invites comparison with Rebecca Skloot''s 2007 <i>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</i>.”—<b><i>Nature  </i></b><br><br>The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases. </b><br> <br>Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe,