The history
From plague survivors in Athens and smallpox scabs in China to cowpox, eating cells, antibodies, and the end of smallpox and polio in India.
For thousands of years people noticed that surviving some diseases protected you from them, and some cultures risked a mild dose to stay safe. Jenner turned that into the first vaccine. Then microscopes and experiments revealed the army behind it: eater cells, antibodies, T cells and B cells that learn and remember. That knowledge wiped out smallpox, drove polio out of India, and produced COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.
1796
First vaccine
Edward Jenner, England
14 June 1802
First vaccination in India
Anna Dusthall, Bombay
1882
Eating cells (phagocytes) described
Élie Metchnikoff, Messina
1897
First vaccine developed in India
Waldemar Haffkine’s plague vaccine, Bombay
1901
First Nobel Prize in medicine
Emil von Behring, for antitoxin
1980
First human disease eradicated
Smallpox, World Health Assembly
27 March 2014
India certified polio-free
WHO South-East Asia Region
430 BCE – 1790
Plague survivors, and variolation in China, India, Turkey and West Africa: a risky mild dose to prevent a deadly one.
430 BCE
c. 430 BCE
During a terrible plague in Athens, the historian Thucydides noticed that people who recovered could nurse the sick safely, because the disease never attacked the same person twice, at least not fatally.
Why it mattered. It is one of the oldest written notes of immunity: surviving a disease can protect you from it.
1570
16th century (the earliest reliable accounts; some claim older)
Chinese doctors ground up dried scabs from mild smallpox cases and blew the powder into a healthy child’s nose. The child usually got a mild illness and was then protected. Historians date reliable accounts to the 1500s; claims of a much older practice are uncertain.
Why it mattered. Deliberately giving a mild dose of a disease, called variolation, was the first attempt to train the immune system.
1721
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had seen variolation in Constantinople and had her daughter inoculated in London in 1721. In Boston the same year, an enslaved West African man, Onesimus, told Cotton Mather how it was done in his homeland, and inoculation was tried during an epidemic.
Why it mattered. Knowledge from Turkey and West Africa brought the idea to Europe and America.
1767
described 1767; how old the practice was is disputed
A British doctor, John Zephaniah Holwell, described travelling inoculators in Bengal who scratched smallpox matter into the skin and then cared for the patient. Some writers claimed the practice was ancient, but no old Sanskrit text describing it has been found, so its age is uncertain.
Why it mattered. It shows variolation was spread across Asia before vaccines existed.
1796 – 1900
Jenner’s cowpox, Pasteur’s weakened germs, Metchnikoff’s eating cells, antitoxins, and Haffkine’s vaccines in India.
1796
14 May 1796
Jenner scratched material from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid’s hand into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. Weeks later he exposed the boy to smallpox, and Phipps did not fall ill. Cowpox is Latin vacca, cow, which gave us the word vaccine.
Why it mattered. It was the first vaccine: a mild, related germ that trained the body to resist a deadly one.
1802
14 June 1802
Smallpox vaccine lymph reached India in May 1802, carried along a chain of vaccinated people. A three-year-old girl in Bombay, Anna Dusthall, became the first person in India to be vaccinated, on 14 June 1802.
Why it mattered. Vaccination arrived in India just six years after Jenner’s experiment.
1882
Watching see-through starfish larvae under a microscope, Metchnikoff pushed rose thorns into them. The next morning, moving cells had crowded around the thorns. He named such cells phagocytes, “eating cells”, and argued they defend the body.
Why it mattered. It was the discovery of innate immunity: neutrophils and macrophages at work, like the splinter in chapter 2.
1885
1879–1885
Pasteur found that old, weakened chicken cholera germs protected hens (1879). He made an anthrax vaccine for sheep (1881), and on 6 July 1885 his team gave a rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog. He survived.
Why it mattered. Pasteur showed vaccines could be made on purpose in the lab by weakening a germ.
1890
December 1890
Von Behring and the Japanese scientist Kitasato showed that the blood serum of animals that survived tetanus or diphtheria could neutralise the germ’s poison and protect other animals. Serum therapy soon saved many children with diphtheria.
Why it mattered. It revealed antibodies in the blood, and it won the first Nobel Prize in medicine in 1901.
1897
1893–1897
Haffkine tested his cholera vaccine on thousands of people in India from 1893. When plague struck Bombay in 1896, he made a plague vaccine in a makeshift lab and tried it on himself first, in January 1897. His Bombay lab later became the Haffkine Institute.
Why it mattered. It is often called the first vaccine developed in India.
1900
1897–1900
Ehrlich proposed that cells carry “side chains” that grab a toxin like a lock and key, and that cells release extra copies into the blood as antitoxins. He dreamed of “magic bullets”: medicines that hit only germs. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize with Metchnikoff.
Why it mattered. His lock-and-key idea is how we still picture antibodies binding antigens.
1900 – 1980
Allergy, antibiotics, clonal selection, T cells, dendritic cells and monoclonal antibodies.
1902
Trying to protect dogs against sea-anemone poison, Richet and Portier found that a second small dose, weeks later, caused a sudden, violent reaction. They called it anaphylaxis, “against protection”.
Why it mattered. It was the first clue that the immune system can overreact, the basis of allergy.
1928
September 1928
Fleming noticed that a mould growing on a dish of bacteria had killed the bacteria around it. The substance, penicillin, was turned into a medicine in the 1940s by Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and colleagues. Fleming warned that misuse could make bacteria resistant.
Why it mattered. Antibiotics help the immune system against bacteria, but not against viruses.
1948
August 1948
A BCG vaccine laboratory was set up at the King Institute in Guindy, and vaccination against tuberculosis began in August 1948. BCG, a weakened cousin of the TB germ, is still given to Indian babies at birth.
Why it mattered. It began one of the world’s largest vaccination efforts.
1955
12 April 1955
A huge field trial showed that Jonas Salk’s killed-virus polio vaccine was safe and effective. Albert Sabin’s weakened, oral vaccine followed, and oral drops later became the main tool of India’s Pulse Polio campaign.
Why it mattered. Polio, which paralysed hundreds of thousands of children a year, could now be stopped.
1957
Burnet proposed that each lymphocyte carries a receptor of one shape. When a germ fits it, that one cell is selected and multiplies into a clone of identical cells, some of which remember the germ. Experiments soon proved him right.
Why it mattered. It explains how the immune system learns and remembers, the heart of chapters 3 and 4.
1961
Doctors had long thought the thymus was useless. Miller removed it from newborn mice and found they could not reject skin grafts or fight infections well. The thymus, he showed, makes the lymphocytes later called T cells.
Why it mattered. It found where T cells are trained.
1973
Looking at mouse spleens under the microscope, Steinman spotted cells with long branching arms and named them dendritic cells. He showed they are the scouts that wake up T cells. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize, awarded days after his death.
Why it mattered. It explained how the adaptive immune system is switched on.
1975
7 August 1975
Köhler and Milstein fused an antibody-making B cell with a cancer cell that never stops dividing. The hybrid made endless copies of one single antibody. They chose not to patent it, so labs everywhere could use it.
Why it mattered. Monoclonal antibodies are now used in pregnancy tests, COVID tests and many cancer and arthritis medicines.
1966 – 2014
Smallpox eradicated, HIV found, India’s Universal Immunisation Programme and the long fight against polio.
1975
May 1975
After a massive search-and-contain campaign, with health workers visiting every village to find cases and vaccinate everyone around them, India recorded its last case of smallpox in 1975. India was declared smallpox-free in 1977.
Why it mattered. India, once home to most of the world’s smallpox cases, had beaten the disease.
1980
8 May 1980
After the last natural case, in Somalia in 1977, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. A disease that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone was gone.
Why it mattered. It is still the only human disease ever eradicated, proof that vaccines plus herd immunity work.
1983
May 1983
Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier found a new virus in a lymph node from a patient. It was later named HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. It infects helper T cells. They shared the 2008 Nobel Prize.
Why it mattered. Knowing the cause led to blood tests and, later, medicines that control HIV.
1985
India expanded its 1978 Expanded Programme on Immunization into the Universal Immunisation Programme, covering six diseases at first. Today it offers free vaccines against 12 diseases to about 2.67 crore newborns and 2.9 crore pregnant women each year.
Why it mattered. It is one of the largest public health programmes in the world.
1986
Dr Suniti Solomon and her student tested blood samples in Madras and found India’s first confirmed HIV infections. Solomon went on to set up care and counselling for people with HIV and fought the stigma around it.
Why it mattered. It started India’s response to HIV, which now includes free treatment for everyone who needs it.
1995
9 December 1995
India held its first national polio immunisation day, giving oral polio drops to every child under five on the same day, at booths, bus stands, railway stations and homes. The drives were repeated for years.
Why it mattered. Reaching every child at once cut off the virus’s chances to spread: herd immunity in action.
2011
13 January 2011
A young girl in Howrah district, West Bengal, was paralysed by wild poliovirus. She was India’s last case. As recently as 2009, India had 741 cases, the most in the world.
Why it mattered. Many experts had thought India would be the hardest place on Earth to beat polio.
2014
27 March 2014
After three years with no wild polio cases, the WHO certified the South-East Asia Region, including India, polio-free. Children in India still get polio vaccine, because the virus survives in a few other countries.
Why it mattered. It showed that high vaccine coverage can wipe a disease out even in a huge, crowded country.
By the numbers
Confirmed wild poliovirus cases (National Polio Surveillance Project, via GPEI, CDC and Indian J Community Med). Cases rose and fell in outbreaks until coverage got high enough, then dropped to zero.
2005 – today
mRNA vaccines, and COVID-19 vaccines including India’s Covaxin, made in under a year.
2005
Karikó and Weissman found that swapping one building block of mRNA kept it from setting off alarm bells in the immune system. Their work, long ignored, made mRNA vaccines practical. They won the 2023 Nobel Prize.
Why it mattered. It let scientists design a new vaccine in days once a virus’s genes were known.
2020
8 December 2020
Less than a year after the new coronavirus was identified, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person to receive an approved COVID-19 vaccine outside a trial. Vaccines made in several ways followed within weeks.
Why it mattered. It was the fastest vaccine development in history, built on decades of earlier work.
2021
3 and 16 January 2021
On 3 January 2021 India’s drug regulator approved Covaxin, a killed-virus vaccine made in India, and Covishield, made by the Serum Institute of India, for emergency use. India’s vaccination drive began on 16 January 2021 and gave more than two billion doses.
Why it mattered. India made and gave vaccines on a scale few countries could match.
Did you know?
The word vaccine comes from vacca, Latin for cow, because the first vaccine used cowpox.
Your marrow makes about 100 billion new neutrophils every day, and most live for only about a day.
Smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated. Polio is close: wild polio now survives in only two countries.
Measles is so contagious that about 19 in every 20 people must be immune to stop it spreading.
Köhler and Milstein chose not to patent monoclonal antibodies, which now earn billions as medicines.
The people
1749 – 1823 · Country doctor · Berkeley, England
Made the first vaccine, from cowpox.
1822 – 1895 · Chemist and microbiologist · Dole, France
Weakened germs on purpose to make vaccines against anthrax and rabies.
1845 – 1916 · Zoologist · Kharkiv region (now Ukraine)
Discovered phagocytes, the cells that eat invaders.
1853 – 1931 · Bacteriologist · Kumamoto, Japan
Co-discovered antitoxin with von Behring and grew the tetanus germ in pure culture.
1860 – 1930 · Bacteriologist · Odesa (now Ukraine), worked in India
Made cholera and plague vaccines in India and tested them on himself first.
1899 – 1985 · Virologist and immunologist · Traralgon, Australia
Explained how the immune system learns with clonal selection.
1938 – 2015 · Microbiologist and doctor · Chennai, India
Found India’s first HIV cases and built care for people living with HIV.
born 1955 · Biochemist · Szolnok, Hungary
With Drew Weissman, made mRNA vaccines possible.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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