History Marie Curie Marie Skodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prize—in physics and chemistry. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.

Curie visited Poland for the last time in the spring of 1934. Only a few months later, on 4 July 1934, Curie died at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, in Haute-Savoie, eastern France, from aplastic anemia contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation. The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were not then known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed, without the safety measures that would later be developed. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the faint light that the substances gave off in the dark. Marie was also exposed to x-rays from unshielded equipment while serving as a radiologist in field hospitals during the war.

Janet Parker Janet Parker (March 1938 – September 11, 1978) was the last person to die from . She was a medical photographer and worked in the Anatomy Department of the University of Birmingham Medical School. Parker died after being accidentally exposed to a strain of smallpox virus that was grown in a research laboratory, on the floor below the Anatomy Department. The event led to the suicide of Professor Henry Bedson, the then Head of the Microbiology Department. An official government inquiry into Parker's death was led by Professor R. A. Shooter, whose report was debated in the British Parliament. Parker's death triggered radical changes in how dangerous pathogens were studied in the UK. The University was prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive for breach of Health and Safety legislation but was cleared in Court.

Fort Detrick (/ˈdiːtrɪk/) is a U.S. Army Medical Command installation located in Frederick, , USA. Historically, Fort Detrick was the center for the ' biological weapons program (1943–69). Today, Fort Detrick's 1,200-acre (490 ha) campus supports a multi-governmental community that conducts biomedical research and development, medical materiel management, global medical communications and the study of foreign plant pathogens. It is home to the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), with its bio-defense agency, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Camp Detrick (1943-56) On 9 March 1943, the government purchased 154 acres (62 ha) encompassing the original 92 acres (37 ha) and re-christened the facility "Camp Detrick". The same year saw the establishment of the U.S. Army Laboratories (USBWL), responsible for pioneering research into biocontainment, decontamination, gaseous sterilization, and agent purification. The first commander, Lt. Col. William S. Bacon, and his successor, Col. Martin B. Chittick, oversaw the initial $1.25 million renovation and construction of the base. World War II and BW research (1943-45) During World War II, Camp Detrick and the USBWL became the site of intensive biological warfare (BW) research using various pathogens. This research was originally overseen by pharmaceuticals executive George W. Merck and for many years was conducted by Ira L. Baldwin, professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin became the first scientific director of the labs. He chose Detrick Field for the site of this exhaustive research effort because of its balance between remoteness of location and proximity to Washington, DC — as well as to Edgewood Arsenal, the focal point of U.S. chemical warfare research. Buildings and other facilities left from the old airfield — including the large hangar — provided the nucleus of support needed for the startup. The 92 acres (37 ha) of Detrick Field were also surrounded by extensive farmlands that could be procured if and when the BW effort was expanded. The Army's Chemical Warfare Service was given responsibility and oversight for the effort that one officer described as "cloaked in the deepest wartime secrecy, matched only by ... the Manhattan Project for developing the Atomic Bomb". Three months after the start of construction, an additional $3 million was provided for five additional laboratories and a pilot plant. Lt. Col. Bacon was authorized 85 officers, 373 enlisted personnel, and 80 enlisted Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) members under two WAAC officers. At its peak strength in 1945, Camp Detrick had 240 officers and 1,530 enlisted personnel including WAACs. Post-war years (1946-55) The elaborate security precautions taken at Camp Detrick were so effective that it was not until January 1946, 4 months after VJ Day that the public learned of the war-time research in biological weapons. In 1952, the Army purchased over 500 acres (200 ha) more of land located between West 7th Street and Oppossumtown Pike to expand the permanent research and development facilities. Two workers at the base died from exposure to in the 1950s. (Another also died in 1964 from viral encephalitis.) There was a building on the base, Building 470 locally referred to as "Anthrax Tower". Building 470 was a pilot plant for testing optimal fermentor and bacterial purification technologies. The information gained in this pilot plant shaped the fermentor technology that was ultimately used by the pharmaceutical industry to revolutionize production of antibiotics and other drugs. Building 470 was torn down in 2003 without any adverse effects on the demolition workers or the environment. The facility acquired the nickname "Fort Doom" while offensive biological warfare research was undertaken there. 5,000 bombs containing anthrax spores were produced at the base during World War II. From 1945 to 1955 under Project Paperclip and its successors, the U.S. government recruited over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists and engineers in a variety of fields such as aircraft design, missile technology and biological warfare. Among the specialists in the latter field who ended up working in the U.S. were , and , who had been involved with medical experiments on concentration camp inmates to test biological warfare agents. Since Britain, France and the Soviet Union were also engaged in recruiting these scientists, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) wished to deny their services to other powers, and therefore altered or concealed the records of their Nazi past and involvement in war crimes. Testing performed on SDAs The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. The quote from the study:

Many experiments that tested various biological agents on human subjects, referred to as , were carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the 1950s. The human subjects originally consisted of volunteer enlisted men. However, after the enlisted men staged a sitdown strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests, Seventh-day Adventists [SDAs] who were conscientious objectors were recruited for the studies. The Army purchased an additional 147 acres (59 ha) in 1946 to increase the size of the original "Area A" as well as 398 acres (161 ha) located west of Area A, but not contiguous to it, to provide a test area known as Area B. In 1952, another 502.76 acres (203.5 ha) were purchased between West 7th Street and Oppossumtown Pike to expand the permanent research and development facilities. Jeffrey Alan Lockwood finds that the biological warfare program at Ft. Detrick began to research the use of insects as disease vectors going back to World War II and also employed German and Japanese scientists after the war who had experimented on human subjects among POWs and concentration camp inmates. Scientists used or attempted to use a wide variety of insects in their biowar plans, including fleas, ticks, ants, lice and mosquitoes—especially mosquitoes that carried the virus. They also tested these in the United States. Lockwood thinks that it is very likely that the U.S. did use insects dropped from aircraft during the Korean War to spread diseases, and that the Chinese and North Koreans were not simply engaged in a propaganda campaign when they made these allegations, since the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense had approved their use in the fall of 1950 at the "earliest practicable time". At that time, it had five bio warfare agents ready for use, three of which were spread by insect vectors. By 1952, the U.S. had dropped insects carrying a wide variety of diseases over China and North Korea, including , anthrax, encephalitis, cholera, dysentery, neurotropic viruses, and plant and livestock pathogens. Fort Detrick (1956-Present) Cold War years (1956-89) Camp Detrick was designated a permanent installation for peacetime biological research and development shortly after World War II, but that status was not confirmed until 1956, when the post became Fort Detrick. Its mandate was to continue its previous mission of biomedical research and its role as the world’s leading research campus for biological agents requiring specialty containment. The most recent land acquisition for the Fort was a parcel of less than 3 acres (1.2 ha) along the Rosemont Avenue fence in 1962, completing the present 1,200 acres (490 ha). On Veterans Day, November 11, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon asked the Senate to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons. Nixon assured Fort Detrick its research would continue. On November 25, 1969, Nixon made a statement outlawing offensive biological research in the United States. Since that time any research done at Fort Detrick has been purely defensive in nature, focusing on diagnostics, preventives and treatments for BW infections. This research is undertaken by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) which transitioned from the previous U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU) and was re-named in 1969. Many former laboratories and some land made available by the disestablishment of the offensive biological warfare program were ultimately transferred to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services during the 1970s and later. The National Cancer Research and Development Center (now the National Cancer Institute-Frederick) was established in 1971 on a 69-acre (28 ha) parcel in Area A ceded by the installation. In 1989 base researchers identified the Ebola virus in a monkey imported to the area from the Philippines. Post-Cold War (1990-present) In 2009, author H. P. Albarelli published the documented book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments about Frank Olson's death and the experiments conducted at Fort Detrick. The book is based on documents released under FOIA and numerous other documents and interviews to the police and investigators. In the 1980s and '90s Jakob Segal claimed that Fort Detrick was the site where the United States government invented HIV. USAMRIID had been the principal consultant to the FBI on scientific aspects of the , which had infected 22 people and killed five. While assisting with the science from the beginning, it also soon became the focus of the FBI's investigation of possible perpetrators (see Steven Hatfill). In July 2008, a top U.S. biodefense researcher at USAMRIID committed suicide just as the FBI was about to lay charges relating to the incidents. The scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who had worked for 18 years at USAMRIID, had been told about the impending prosecution. The FBI's identification of Ivins in August 2008 as the Anthrax Attack perpetrator remains controversial and several independent government investigations which will address his culpability are ongoing. Although the anthrax preparations used in the attacks were of different grades, all of the material derived from the same bacterial strain. Known as the Ames strain, it was first researched at USAMRIID. The Ames strain was subsequently distributed to at least fifteen bio-research labs within the U.S. and six locations overseas. In June, 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to add the base to the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. On 9 April 2009, "Fort Detrick Area B Ground Water" was added to the list which currently includes 18 other sites within Maryland. About 7,900 people work at Fort Detrick. The base is the largest employer in Frederick County and contributes more than $500 million into the local economy annually. In 2012 the United States National Research Council published a report that reviewed two investigations of potential health hazards at Fort Detrick: a 2009 public health assessment conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and a cancer investigation in Frederick County by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Frederick County Health Department. The report found the two studies are unable to demonstrate whether people were harmed by groundwater contaminated with toxic pollutants from Area B of Fort Detrick. Furthermore, it is unlikely that additional studies could establish a link, because data on early exposures were not collected and cannot be obtained or reliably estimated now.

Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989) If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, it was the image of General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito standing side by side during their historic first meeting on September 27, 1945. In it, a casually dressed MacArthur towers over the stiff, formally attired Emperor. "What does it say?" asks historian Carol Gluck. "It says, I'm MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, and I'm in charge." For millions of Japanese, it brought home in an entirely new way the notion that they had lost the war.

The man known as Tenno to his subjects and Hirohito to the rest of the world ranks as one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century. The ambiguity surrounding his role in leading Japan to war makes simple judgments of him all but impossible. And the cultural barriers may be even more formidable than the factual ones: to many of his subjects, the "emperor of heaven" was not really a man at all, but the living embodiment of the Japanese people. Whatever one's perspective, his life offers a powerful lens through which to view Japan's tumultuous history in this century.

Installed as Crown Prince at the age of fifteen, Hirohito assumed the "Chrysanthemum Throne" in 1926 with the death of his father, the Emperor Yoshihito (now known as the Taisho Emperor; with his death, Hirohito's reign took the name Showa). Because his father had been a weak and sickly man, Hirohito ruled more in the shadow of his grandfather, the great Emperor Meiji , who presided over Japan's late-19th-century opening up to the West. Even before he assumed the throne, Hirohito reflected the same fascination with the West, particularly after a six-month tour of Europe in 1921, where he picked up a life-long taste for Western food and clothes. This is the Hirohito the world also saw in 1975, when he finally realized his dream of visiting the United States, where he met John Wayne, was received by President Ford, and acquired a Mickey Mouse watch he wore for years.

In between, however, he presided over one of the largest and most costly military ventures in human history. In the decades after the war, the accepted version of events held that Hirohito was essentially a pawn of the militarists who gained control of the government shortly after he took the throne. MacArthur, convinced he needed the Emperor to run a smooth occupation, played no small part in establishing this version. With Hirohito's quiet manner, love of haiku and marine biology, the image of the peace-loving man who was powerless to stop his country's murderous expansion took hold. But in the decade since his death, a more open inquiry into what happened has convinced a number of historians that this version, while partially true, is far from accurate. Hirohito's ability to thwart the militarists was certainly limited -- he was more a symbol of the state than an actual ruler -- but he was not nearly as blameless as his defenders would have it. The occupation official and historian Richard B. Finn sums it up this way: "The decisions that led to the war in 1941 were made unanimously by the cabinet, the emperor was fully informed about them, they were often made in his presence, he knew in advance of the plan to attack Hawaii, and he even made suggestions about how to carry it out."

On August 15, 1945, the Japanese people heard the voice of their emperor for the first time, and while he avoided using the word "surrender," his meaning was clear. Although "the voice of the crane" was heard far too late -- Japan had lost 2.3 million soldiers and 800,000 civilians in the war -- in the difficult days ahead the emperor did provide a much-needed measure of national unity. Accepting MacArthur's implicit bargain -- help me and I'll keep you from being tried as a war criminal -- Hirohito did his part to remake Japan along an American model, backing the new constitution, "renouncing" his divinity, and trying gamely to play the part of "Japan's first democrat." By the time his 62-year reign came to an end, Japan had risen like a Phoenix out of the postwar rubble to become one of the world's richest countries. It was in demonstrating this remarkable capacity for change that Hirohito truly became the living symbol of his people.

Neo-Gomanism Neo Gmanism Manifesto Special - On War (新・ゴーマニズ ム宣言 SPECIAL 戦争論 Shin Gmanism Sengen Supesharu - Sens Ron?) is a controversial series of manga written by right- wing Japanese manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi. It was published in a series of three volumes by Gentosha as a supplement (hence the "Special" title) to the Neo Gmanism (新・ゴーマニズム宣 言 Shin Gmanism Sengen?) series serialized in SAPIO magazine from September 1995 onwards. There are currently no plans to translate these books into English or any other languages. The series has been criticized by numerous people and groups for "rewriting history", including intellectuals Satoshi Uesugi, Shinji Miyadai and Takaaki Yoshimoto, The Academy of Outrageous Books, and extending even to the overseas media in newspapers such as The New York Times and Le Monde. A verbal dispute over the manga's contents with Sichir Tahara has been published in a book called The On War War (戦争論争 戦 Sens Ron Ssen). Besides the ideological criticism, the books have also been found to contain historical errors, clear manipulation of evidence, and illogical arguments. For example, the manga states that "The lands of Manchuria did not belong to the present-day Chinese people", although it did not belong to the Japanese either. Also, the manga claims that only Japan remained independent while East Asia was colonized by the West (with a map showing all of Asia, including East, South and South-East Asia), but the independent nation of Siam and the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan are ignored. Another important point is that the manga was mainly intended to agitate young readers with little to no previous historical knowledge of the issue.

Unit 731 Unit 731 (731 部隊 Nana-san-ichi butai, Chinese: 731 部队) was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部 Kantgun Beki Kysuibu Honbu?). Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China). More than 10,000 people—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai—were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731. More than 95% of the victims who died in the camp based in Pingfang were Chinese and Korean, including both civilian and military. The remaining 5% were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of the prisoners of war from the Allies of World War II. According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000. According to other sources, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731's bioweapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in possibly as many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China. Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others surrendered to the American Forces. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence." The deal was concluded in 1948. A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (丸太 maruta?).This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, and also people rounded up by the Kempetai for alleged "suspicious activities". They included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women. Vivisection Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants. Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss.[ Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners. In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, "I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it." He believes at least 1,000 people, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections over mainland China. Weapons testing Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions. Flame throwers were tested on humans. Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs. Germ warfare attacks Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were infested with fleas in order to acquire large quantities of disease-carrying fleas for the purposes of studying the viability of germ warfare. Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around 400,000 Chinese civilians. was tested on Chinese civilians. Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644, Unit 100, et cetera) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with epidemics. Other experiments Prisoners were subjected to other torturous experiments such as being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death, having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism, and having horse urine injected into their kidneys. Other incidents include being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death, being placed into high-pressure chambers until death, having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival, being placed into centrifuges and spun until death, having animal blood injected and the effects studied, being exposed to lethal doses of x-rays, having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers, being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline, being burned alive and buried alive. Biological Warfare Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938. These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, scientists dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candies were given out to unsuspecting victims and children, and the results examined.

USAMRIID The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, pronounced U- sam-rid) is the U.S Army’s main institution and facility for defensive research into countermeasures against biological warfare. It is located on Fort Detrick, Maryland and is a subordinate lab of the U. S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), headquartered on the same installation. USAMRIID is the only U.S. Department of Defense laboratory equipped to study highly hazardous viruses at Biosafety Level 4 within positive pressure personnel suits. USAMRIID employs both military and civilian scientists as well as highly specialized support personnel, in all about 800 people. In the 1950s and 1960s, it pioneered unique, state-of-the-art biocontainment facilities which it continues to maintain and upgrade. Investigators at its facilities frequently collaborate with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and major biomedical and academic centers worldwide. USAMRIID was the first bio-facility of its type to research the Ames strain of anthrax, determined through genetic analysis to be the bacterium used in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Tuberculosis Vaccines Tested in India The TB vaccine is tested on pregnant women in India volunteering in return for payment. It is not recommended that pregnant women have the TB vaccine administered.

In the 21st century, new ethical issues surrounding clinical trials are on the horizon. For the sake of transparency and greater patient safety, there are now calls by the World Health Organization for the data from all trials—including trials conducted by private pharmaceutical companies—to be published in a clinical trial registry. As drug companies have become multinational in orientation, there are increasing fears that clinical trials will be “exported” to parts of the world with large poor populations such as India ; in effect, populations in these parts of the world may become guinea pigs on which to test therapies, which will later be used by inhabitants of richer and more developed countries. From this perspective, contemporary issues in the design of clinical trials could be seen as an issue of global justice.

Eduard Pernkopf’s Atlas Eduard Pernkopf (1888–1955) was an Austrian professor of anatomy, rector of the University of Vienna (1943–1945), member of the Nazi party since 1933, famous for his anatomical atlas,Topographische Anatomie des Menschen (translated as Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy). Pernkopf began his atlas in 1933. He worked 18- hour days dissecting corpses while a team of artist created the images that would eventually be in the atlas. He worked for over two decades on the atlas. In 1996 Pernkopf and his atlas came into the focus of a controversy in scientific ethics when Dr. Howard Israel, an oral surgeon at Columbia University revealed that it was based on bodies of victims of Nazi terror. The question was discussed whether it is ethical to use Nazi's medical research. With the help of other parties, Dr. Israel directed a request to the University of Vienna to investigate the issue. This resulted in the establishment of the Senatorial Project of the University of Vienna "Studies in Anatomical Science in Vienna from 1938 to 1945" in 1997. The project confirmed that at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons were delivered to the University during the Nazi times and its usage cannot be excluded from at least 800 images of the atlas. A number of scientists concluded that the continued use of the atlas is desirable in teaching of anatomy, history, and ethics.

Dr. Edward Jenner Edward Anthony Jenner (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist from Berkeley, Gloucestershire, who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine. He is often called "the father of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more lives than the work of any other man". Inoculation was already a standard practice but involved serious risks. In 1721 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had imported variolation to Britain after having observed it in Istanbul, where her husband was the British ambassador. Soon, Voltaire recorded that 60% of the population caught smallpox and 20% of the population died of it. In 1765, Dr Fewster published a paper in the London Medical Society entitled "Cow pox and its ability to prevent smallpox", but he did not pursue the subject further. In the years following 1770, at least six investigators in England and (Sevel, Jensen, Jesty 1774, Rendell, Plett 1791) successfully tested a cowpox vaccine in humans against smallpox. For example, Dorset farmer Benjamin Jesty successfully vaccinated and presumably induced immunity with cowpox in his wife and two children during a smallpox epidemic in 1774, but it was not until Jenner's work some twenty years later that the procedure became widely understood. Indeed, Jenner may have been aware of Jesty's procedures and success. Noting the common observation that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox, Jenner postulated that the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox. He may already have heard of Benjamin Jesty's success. On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating James Phipps, a boy eight years old (the son of Jenner's gardener), with pus scraped from the cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom, whose hide now hangs on the wall of the St George's medical school library (now in Tooting). Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenner's first paper on vaccination. Jenner inoculated Phipps in both arms that day, subsequently producing in Phipps a fever and some uneasiness but no full-blown infection. Later, he injected Phipps with variolous material, the routine method of immunization at that time. No disease followed. The boy was later challenged with variolous material and again showed no sign of infection. Ronald Hopkins has written, "Jenner's unique contribution was not that he inoculated a few persons with cowpox, but that he then proved [by subsequent challenges] that they were immune to smallpox. Moreover, he demonstrated that the protective cowpox pus could be effectively inoculated from person to person, not just directly from cattle. In addition Jenner successfully tested his hypothesis on 23 additional subjects.