working in new york sitting prison psychiatric ward. part of book tv in prime time, all this week on c-span2. >> in her book, the vaccine race, meredith writes about the effort to wipe out once common diseases such as polio, chickenpox, measles, and hepatitis. she talked about the book at the 2017 book festival.omoc this is just under one hour.ay. >> i am very pleased to introduce doctor meredith wadman. she has an impressive career. she received her ba in biology from stanford, her m.d. from oxford university where she was a rhodes scholar and a degree in journalism from columbia university. in addition, she has written for the new york times, the washington post, and the journal of nature, among others. she is currently a staff writer at science magazine. as a researcher in training, i

was excited to read her book, the vaccine race, science, politics. the centers for disease control and prevention considers vaccinations a number one public health achievement of the 20th century. indeed, vaccines have saved millions of lives. it is because of vaccinations that smallpox was eradicated and a scourge of other diseases such as polio, new bella and chickenpox are a thing of the past. l this is not only the story of great achievement in public health. it's also about the men, women and children who helped make these vaccines possible. throughout this book, contemporary interviews with key players bring the personalities of these important scientists and individuals alive on the page. she does not shy away from the uncomfortable truth embedded within the history of vaccine experiments.portan the vaccine race reminds us that it's important that we learn from our past so that the story written in theri future about how we solve the crisis of today is much more

ethically grounded. perhaps the greatest praise i can give this book is a book for those interested in american history and politics and for those who champion the cause of social justice. we are very lucky to have her here with us today. please help me welcome her to the stage. [applause] >> thank you for the welcome. i'm so pleased to be here. thank you especially to theo book festival organizers. i can't think of a better way to spend a saturday than among people who love to read and write books.ho love it's a tremendous honor to be here. i will start by telling you a little bit about myself. i was born into a medical family. my dad was a doctor. my mom was a public health nurse. we grew up very much and viewed with the idea that vaccination was a good and important thing. it wasn't until, as a medical

student, i had a chance to go to south africa on a pediatric rotation of the major hospital for blacks during the apartheid area that it really came home to me how lucky we were in our communities to be protected by many vaccines. this is a horribly overcrowded, underfunded hospital as you will see from these four infants crammed into an incubator. typically the hospital had a a a large area and by the time kids got there in the role districts, they were really sick. they were typically unvaccinated and malnourished. when you get a lack of vaccinations in combination with malnutrition at the devastating cycle.ev the measles will cripple these kids either invading their brains in the lungs withas pneumonia. >> it's not advancing. any idea why? sorry. it did. bad.s lung

this child had just died from measles that invaded his lungs. i went on during medical school to realize that my calling was actually to be a writer and i was able to write an article about the hospital for a newspaper, and that was a moment of truth for me but i thought i would go on to journalism and be a medical writer and i've been luckyng enough to do that here in washington for 20 years ate most of the time for nature, but more recently for science. it's a bit like going from the red sox to the keys, but actually were all one big happy family and science journalism and there's lots of crossover.about why write a book called the vaccine race and what's it about?a i will briefly, becauseg there's a lot in the book, i will speed along but touch on major points. one is the cells at the heart of this book are called wy 38 cells. they were derived from an aborted fetus and used to make many vaccines.

the most important is the rubella vaccine. that's the race at the heart of the book. finally i will speak about some of the people who were used and often abused in the race 50, 60 years ago to get new therapies and vaccines. >> how did i actually get started on this project? it really began with another book, many of you may be o familiar with it. it's about an event in 1951 in which a 31-year-old, largelyoman illiterate woman was dying of cervical cancer. doctors at johns hopkins took cells from her womb and became a very important tool in medical research print she was unaware with this and the author of the book spend a lot of time examining the impact of that on her family was left behind. i could not put that book down.o

that book was foremost in my mind a couple years later when i came across a letter to the editor of science magazine from someone called leonard who identified himself as a scienc scientist from california and basically said in this letter that he was getting all the attention from the cells of henrietta lacksve but sh he derived some cells from an aborted fetus andd they've been used to make cells to help millions of people and that he got into an intellectual property fight in the 70s about who owned those cells and it raised questions that are still unanswered today. that letter just leapt off the page at me. very shortly thereafter i found him. he was 84 years old. by the way, today is the very day, it's his 89th birthday and he still going strong. anyway, i found him and i said it sounds like there's an untold story. he said is there ever. shortly thereafter i had a

college reunion in california and i was able to visit him at his home in northern california and hear the story of the wy 38 cells from the beginning. in 2012, with his wife ruth, he took me back down memory lane to this place, andd elegant campus but independent of it, it was sort of a creepy mausoleum of 19th century america anatomy with all these horrible specimens in the late 50s.the ma this was at a time when the man in the middle, hillary kotowski was recruited to give the institute a new life. he became a director. he was a larger-than-life character, a polish immigrantfa

who had escaped from hitler in the nick of time, fled with his young family via south america to the states. he wasn't epicure, he was a polymath. he could discuss biology, he loved wine and women and songfie and he definitely looked down on american scientists as being just a bit colonial. so when he hired the young leonard who, in this pictured is about 30 years old, who was a working-class philadelphian who grabbed himself up by the bootstraps and worked his way to a phd in medical biology at the university of pennsylvania, they looked on him as a technician hired to serve up dishes of cells for experiments to the really outstanding biologists from all over the world that he had recruited. he was a very bright guy. he would ambitious and he was

not about to be made a second-class citizen are stopped from doing science. he wasn't going to be a household servant. what did he do? he began cutting fetuses from abortions that were conducted across the street at the hospital of the university of pennsylvania.l offens abortion was a criminal offense in every u.s. state in this era.f the moth in pennsylvania, there was not even an exception in the criminal law that would be okay to do an abortion to savein the life of the mother.allel you could get ten years of hard labor and lots of fine but there was a parallelro universe that operated aside from major medical centers where if they could do a so-called medical therapeutic abortion justified by doctorsrsh for mysterious reasons, then they tolerated it. that's how he began to receive this flow of fetuses every few months and he would grow fetal

cells in lab dishes. it was an article of faith and belief that if you grew cellsre in lab dishes, they should grow forever. they were immortal. if for some reason they died, it was a screwup on the part of the scientists. temperature wasn't right in the incubation room or someone sneezed on the culture and infected them or the nutritious broth used to nourish the cells was somehowse. deficient. so when his cell started dying after several months, first the cells from the first fetus started to get decrepit and then the next one and the next. he thought he was growing up. he did all kinds of experience. what was he doing wrong? you can see on the left, those are young, healthy fetal cells from the lungs and those are old elderly, dis- organized and decrepit cells in the last stages of life. why were they dying?

he finally saw what decades ofof scientist had not seen, that cells in lab dishes are as mortal as you where i provided they are normal and not cancerous cells. cancerous cells, by definition, will grow forever. these were afforded cells from healthy normal fetuses and they were dying and he published a paper that said as much and took a huge amount of flak. that was 1961. that paper made his name. it took years for his finding to be accepted. you talk to any young cell biologist today and mentioned leonard and they will know of the hay flick limit of 50 cell divisions that cells will go through before they die if they are normal cells. while, immediately when the paper was published there was tremendous interest among scientist. they wanted to get a hold of these cells and they wanted to do experiments on the normalio biology of aging.

the mih was equally interested because they wanted to find scientists to look into the cells. there was a failure and all the cells he had derived had died by mistake.g to d what was he going to do? the nih funded him to start developing new lines. a lot of money came from and nih. hundred $20000. year and a tiny piece of the contract said, if you finish this contract, all the materials developed under it become the property of the federal government and they are ours to keep and you will hand them back to us as. instruction. he also had an interest in developing new fetal cell lines for a very particular reason involved in vaccine making and it had to do with this rhesus monkey. you will probably recall in 1955, the polio vaccine was introduced. it was a great public-health

victory of the era. it was produced in monkey kidney cells and it became apparent throughout the 1950s that those kidney cells harbored silent viruses. l by the late 1950s, tens of millions of children in this country had been vaccinatedmonk and some of the silent monkey viruses were in the vaccine, up to 30 million children were exposed to monkey viruses that have penetrated the vaccine. it was thought to have been killed by formaldehyde, the same formaldehyde used to kill the virus. they were walking around and seemed perfectly healthy and so regulators do not worry too much. a quick review of biology, viruses are basically a piece of genetic material surrounded by a protein coat. on their own they don't eat,

sleep, drink, have sex or move around. they must invade cells in a order to reach produce themselves.ed the it will hijack the cellular machinery, make copies of itself and those copies, out of the cell. that's how viruses replicate. when you want to make a viral vaccine, you need cells as you need vaccine factories to make the vaccine, thus the use of monkey kidney cells. >> on the left, and unsung heroine of 20th century medicine in my opinion. bernice came from a town of less than 200 in west virginia, worked her way through the phd in cincinnati and discovered in 1960 that the kidney cells being used to k make the polio vaccine harbored a particular monkey virus that caused a uniform fatal cancer in her laboratory hamsters. she alerted her bosses. she was silenced and demoted.

she was put to work in what had been a supply room with one staffer and she just put up with the punishment. she had amazing staying power.ot the the only newspaper that paid attention to this news, while the mainstream press ignored it, was the national enquirer, which in effect got the story right. there was a polio vaccine cover-up. yes there was a particular virus in the vaccine, and no one knew in the long term what it might do in terms of causing cancer. it is very clear it had caused cancer in the hamsters and soon it was clear that if you scrape some cells from human beings cheek it would also cause cancer in those. regulators got worried. they moved to another monkey species in 1963 for producing polio vaccine going forward. she looked at all of this and thought what the heck. why don't we get cells from one clean normal fetus and they will multiply and we can use them at infant item.

we will know they're safe and we can dispense with the monkeys and slaughtering them which was the expense of a nasty business. hay flick needed a source of an aborted fetus where he could go back and get the medical histor history. the surgeons at the university of pennsylvania didn't care about his work. it was a pain in the butt for them. he needed someone who understood vaccine making and its importance. through a connection he was able to contact the institute in stockholm where abortion was legal and obtain an aborted fetus from mrs. x who was, in 1962, the mother of several young children with a husband who wasn't much use, he was often out of town and he wasn't much help when he was around. he was an alcoholic with a criminal record. although was legal in sweden to get an abortion, it was not easy. many doctors wouldn't perform them.

by the time mrs. acts found a gynecologist who agreed to perform the abortion, she was four months pregnant. she was a character in and of herself. i'll tell you about that another time. after the abortion, unbeknownst to mrs. acts, the fetus was wrapped in a cloth and transported to the institute in stockholm where the lungs were dissected, put on ice and flown to philadelphia where the scientist was waiting. in the summer of 1962, ass social change was coming in the u.s., many. [inaudible] he spent that summer deriving the wi 38 cells. he named them from mrs. x fetus. he created 800 of these tiny cells. each had two or 3 million

cells. each cell had the potential to divide another 40 times. if you do the math, you realize simply one little bottle of about 10 million cells will producepanded. 22 million-tons of cells when it's fully expanded. for practical purposes they created the supply of cellsou that was infinite, especially when you realize if you freeze these 800 cells and take out just one, that, whether sought out a year later, a decade later or 50 years later, they will begin dividing again. they will remember how manyy times they divided before they were frozen and they will continue up to roughly 50 divisions. they will still use the cells today just like this one from the summer of 1962.the they were excited about the cells. they did all kinds of lab test and it was clear that the

cells were clean and safe. he sent the young physician back to interview mrs. acts after the abortion to make sure her family was free of infectious diseases and cancer. this is how she rudely learned that in fact her fetus had been taken. she provided a medical history that made clear there were noali problems of health and her history, but they iran into someone who was the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. this guy. robbery. very smart harvard educated physician, an expert, but he had been in the south pacific with the u.s. medical corps as a physician in 1942 when there was a terrible accident with yellow fever vaccine.itil tens of thousands of military men were infected with hepatitis b that had mistakenly infected this yellow fever vaccine. up to 150 of them died. murray witnesses this act closed quarters and probably put the fear of god in him.

about 13 years later when this vaccine was first rolled out,e he was second-in-command in the vaccine safety division and he saw was called cutter unfold. cutter laboratories produced a vaccine that had live poliovirus in it. 192 people were paralyzed and ten died. there had to be a recall of the vaccine. it was a terrible situation. os everyone was fired. state he was moved into his bosses position and he became the chief vaccine regulator for the entire united states.us he was in the nih because of the time that's where vaccine regulation was residing. it was only later moved to fda. murray kept his own counsel and was terribly slow to make decision but very conservative and did not want to make changes unless he was absolutely forced too. when he looked at the fetal

cells, he was afraid they were going to cause cancer. even as european companies and european clinical trialto companies rush to use them. his cells were completely stymied. >> i will take a right turn, but i promise i'll come back to the storyline. in 1954, a massive rebel epidemic descended on the united states. it was a start. nothing like it had been seen before. rubella is a mild disease, if you are i get it or children get it might spike a fever, you might have a rash or youed might not even know your infected and up to two thirds of people it's extremely mild. however if a pregnant woman gets it is devastating on the fetus. unlike zika virus which affects pregnancies in about 15% of first trimesters, new bella will damage almost

everyone between 90 and 100%. in the midst of this rubella epidemic, women were terrified and many were affected. more than 20000 babies were born blind, deaf, intellectually disabled with shrunken heads, heart defects, combinations of these conditions, and a number of other women who chose to terminate their pregnancies because of the epidemic. they couldn't be sure they'd have rubella. they were worried about it. it was all very scary. those are pictures of tiny rubella particles moving between cells. when rubella affects the fetus, it affects virtually every fetal organ. one of the outcomes is cataract cataracts. this is steven who was born during the 1964, 65 epidemic, blin blind, deaf and with

heart defects. he is pictured here about age eight. this family worked up the stairs around the corner from the institute. he was a self-made man, grew up in the bronx with not to pennies to rub together. he worked his way through medical school and was overshot out of medical school because he was jewish. he earned the state scholarship which meant that the downstate medical center could not turn him down for medical school. he had his heart set on making vaccines.la he had emulated harry witkowski who had been up polio vaccine pioneer and they decided in the midst of this epidemic that he was going to do something about it. he had already been working in britain where the epidemic hit a year earlier so he knew what it did to babies. he returned to philadelphia in 1964 as it descended and soon became known as the only doctor in philadelphia who could run a very likely blood

test that would tell a pregnant woman if she had been infected.virus couples would say please can i have the blood test. when the test was positive and a family chose to abort, he asked them, could i receive the fetus from the abortion because i'm trying to isolate rubella virus from that fetus.umber he received 31 fetuses in the course of the calendar year 1964. it was fetus number 27 from which he captured rubella virus that grew wellin the wi 38 cells. that's just a sense of the anxiety that women experienced. this was on the cover of life magazine in june 1965. he was up against big competition as he set up to develop a vaccine.

many major drug companies saw what the market was going to be for this vaccine. every woman of childbearing age in this country and around the world would want this vaccine, plus probably regulators would recommend it for young children so they wouldn't expose their mothers. merck was involved, glaxosmithkline and another sophisticated company so this lonely academic scientists was also very stubborn and very determined.popula when he had developed the vaccine, he did what virtually all of his colleagues did, he found a powerless institution on which to pass it. he went to the archbishop of philadelphia which are owned in operated an orphanage andpl the first vaccine took place on toddlers in this orphanage. i will pause here. i'm going to pause to read you a little bit from the book about what the orphanage wasl r? like.

please wave at me if you are not hearing me. >> the st. vincent's home from children, at 6900 greenway avenue in south philadelphia was made of red brick. it was three stories tall and took up most of the city block. it's two symmetrical wings were marked by rectangular windows.crow high above these was crowned with stone crosses so the roman catholic archdiocese owned and operated the home. while many called the st. vincent home an orphanage, not all the parents of the 65 children who lived there in november 1964 were dead. some were sick or destitute or in jail or heading that way. some were unmarried girls and young women who had been chosen or been forced to give up their children for adoption. there was an attorney the home and hospital for unwed mothers across the lane. when those babies were born if they weren't adopted within the first year they were

passed across the lane to the orphanage. many were black or mixed race children who weren't adopted. five nuns staffed it. with childcare workers who cared for the children in assembly-line fashion. there were two cooks, two stray dogs and a grumpy maintenance man. the nuns belong to the missionary sisters and.e [inaudible] they lived in simple singlee rooms on the third floor and worshiped in a small chapel on the ground floor. the rest of the lower two floors house the children. it was a spartan place with hardwood floors and stall us bathrooms with tiny toilets. the nuns try to make up in love what the building lacked in physical warmth making sure they got out every day on the playground surrounded by chain-link fence and reading t to them and walking them to nearby parks. still they worried about the

children. the sisters knew they were children after all and there were so many of them. every one of them needed an adult or two to belong to. a level of care and attention she couldn't possibly provide. they were crushing moments. the day of foster familybo arrived to take one way away when he unraveled in screams in wales, the unforgettable lost look that an unnamed sister married joseph observed when she discovered a beautifully wrapped present that the arch bishop handed to her at the annual christmas party in a downtown hotel was in fact, just a decoration, an empty box. it was from the spectacled archbishop, philadelphia's top area that he got a green light to study his new rubella vaccine. in his letter requestings

permission, he did not explain to the archbishop that he had captured the vaccine virus from one aborted fetus and grown it in cells from another. he was passionately antiabortion. in 1973, he would call the supreme court row versus wade decision striking down criminal abortion laws as an unspeakable tragedy for this nation.ere. in 1964, the archbishop gave the rubella study the go-ahead. i will stop there. >> i thought this was supposed to be a 50 minut 50 minute talk but i understand it's 40 so i will move along quickly. basically, he was outdone by merck and others who political favoritism one approval for their rubella vaccine in 1969.

rebel epidemics came around every six or seven years.. there had been a tremendous race to get a rubella vaccine before 1970 when the next was expected. in 1969, the u.s. vaccinee regulators approved three pharmaceutical company vaccines. it emerged, however, because of one woman, the first chairwoman of pediatrics at yale who went to bat for the vaccine and played close attention to the studies on it. his acting was actually better.er it generated better levels of antibodies from the vaccines that have been licensed and fewer side effects. dorothy, who did not take no for an answer went to maurice, the chief vaccine maker at merck, someone who people lived in fear and trepidation of. tremendously respected and also tremendously powerful. she told them, in no uncertain terms, you have to drop the

inferior vaccine and stop making his vaccine. i can't tell you what he told her, but eventually he agreed and, to this day, as from 1979 with the first mmr vaccine, merck manufactured with his vaccine in it, and to this day this vaccine protects 4 million american babies who are injected and x as exported 40 other countries. there's no doubt it has prevented tens of millions of abortions and fetal abnormalities and does so to this day. the first vaccine made with the fetal cells that were derived in 1962 was finallype

approved in 1972 by u.s. relators. how did this happen?its job 1972 rod murray was finally pushed out of his job as the u.s. vaccine regulator and regulation was moved over the fda. this poliovirus vaccine became the first on the u.s. market made with the wy38 cells. what happened to jefe? we left him back in 1962, having just derive the cells under the contract that said he had to hand them back over when the contract was up. by 1968, he was tired of being treated as a second-class citizen by the rest of the world class biologists. he found himself a better job at stanford. he had designed data groups, hang on.

he had designs on the wy 38 cells.va by 1968 he had made a rubella vaccine and cells were there in abundance. they have a patented recipe for the rubella vaccine and i can give you all that you need in order to make it. let's make a deal. they got a hold of the letter. a flick said over my dead body. he didn't even have the courtesy to let me know about this. hey flick about him know he was leaving and nih had a meeting with him in early 1968 and said okay, we need to turn the salt back over when you leave in june. after he saw this letter, he went quietly to the basement when no one was looking. he packed all the remaining

400 odd files into a portable liquid nitrogen refrigerator which looks a bit like a 10 100-pound bomb without the wings. he strapped in the backseat of the sedan and put his kids in the other seat and drove 3000 miles to california via the grand canyon and other destinations. nih was fit to be tied when the camping with the cells was discovered. however, nothing was done about it until hey flick who had been handing the cells out for free decided to set up a company in the 70s and began selling the cells, including to mark. he signed a contract with merck. it would've been worth up to $1 million to him personally

but shortly after he signed that, nih heard and got wind that he was selling it and sent out the chief investigator of fraud and abuse, a no-nonsense guy, james shriver to investigate hey flick. i will speed through his demise. he resigned under pressure from sanford and resided for many years in the academic wilderness. they put it so accurately when they said when it became public, this really is a tragedy. this is a man who at the height of his tower brought about his own downfall. that's the front page of the new york times on a sunday in march 1976 were one of the headline says, nih says investigators sold cells owned by the united states. hey flick spent many years refuting his reputation. if you talk to anyone today, what they know about is the

hey flick limit and his very important discovery of cell mortality. they will not be aware of those really difficult years. the british imitated his method and produced another line in 1966 more than 6 billion doses of vaccine against all of these diseases, measles, rabies, hepatitis, chickenpox and polio have been made and vaccinated against shingles. hey flick's bought the court

for five years until 1981. in 1981 the government settled with them, mainly because times are changing.. academic scientists were being asked to do a 180-degree turn to be servants for the common good and start looking out for the next commercial opportunity because there was a law that came in that said institutions. [inaudible] in other words, they were encouraged to become entrepreneurs. given this new law was hard to the nra to keep prosecuting him and they settled with him under the terms of the settlement he was able to keep six samples of the cells and the rest were returned to the government.illance at many are still under 247an surveillance at the american culture collection.t with keep some in his garage in

california. for years and years he would drive back and forth every few months to buy new liquid nitroge nitrogen. in 2006 he decided enoughti already. he said the cells are like mych children, it's time my children should leave home and he sent them off to a laboratory in new jersey. mrs. x never saw a penny from the cells which had made drugmakers many billions of dollars through the rubella vaccine. that's much like the henrietta lacks story. i will open it up for questions now. [applause]

>> have a question that is on and off topic. he referenced earlier the infected kidney cells of the monkeys. what's your thought about the theories that has floated around that one epicenter of hiv was because those people had been vaccinated with infected vaccination. >> there was a big controversy about at the turn-of-the-century and actually went back to the original vaccines that were used and they found absolutely no trace of hiv or anything that would implicate those vaccines. the society in britain to the long study and that has really been completely debunked. that's not where hiv came from. it's not a contributing factor.

i'm also happy to talk about current politics of that's on anybody's mind. i know in recent interviews i've had lots of questions about tha that. >> with abortion legal now, it seems that it would be relatively simple to get new cell lines. is that being pursued? you talked only like there were two magic cell lines and it just seems like any competent pharmaceutical company can create a new cell line whenever they wanted to. >> rate. there is a two-part answer to that. one is that vaccine technology, in many ways has

gone past using whole self to producing vaccines. they use little snippets of dna so it's not an antiquated technology, but one that you wouldn't think of using going forward, by and large. the other thing is, if it's broke, don't fix it. there's a lot of experience using with these vaccines using the cells. cells like people have their own characteristics in the lab. if you're very familiar with the cell line, you don't really want to start over using another one because there's a huge experience accumulated around that cell line. with that being said, just last year a chinese company derived a new aborted fetal cell line because they wanted to have their own source of human fetal cells for vaccine making. it is done, but not frequently and there is still lots and lots of wy 38 and mrc on hand. are people getting cancer from that vaccine line.

those people are probably in their 60s. >> that's exactly right. anyone vaccinated between 1955 and 61 who would be in the pool who are possibly exposed to that. the institute of medicine did a very extensive, exhaustive study on that question which was published in 2001. what they concluded was it's highly unlikely. it can absolutely be rolled out because the studies that were done at the time, there's data that can definitively answer that question for the bottom line was it seems very unlikely. >> thank you. >> if you're interested in getting a lot more information about that question and the whole virus and vaccine, there is a book called the virus and the vaccine published about ten years ago that really has

chapter and verse on the whole controversy. it also has a very definite point of view. >> where we stand currently in the race for an ebola vaccine. >> i think it's about to be deployed in the democratic republic of congo. it hasn't been proved but there's an outbreak there as we speak and i think the move might come any day to put that candidate vaccine into use. i'm not rate up to speed on where the other candidates are. there have not been one license, i can tell you that much but i know there are several candidates. >> thank you for all of the research that you have put into this.

i am wondering why the myth about vaccine and autism have persisted despite the scientific evidence and why anti- vax still have a strong sway over a certain portion ofof the population when the consensus is that these vaccines don't cause autism. >> a lot of people asked themselves that question. i think in part it's part of a mentality right now that is common across issues including global warming where a distrust authority and expertise, questioning of facts exist. i think that some of it but i think there's also a deep human need, if your child has

autism, you want to know there's a reason or a cause or to tell a story about what caused it to happen. we all know that's not tremendously satisfying. unfortunately, i think, because of the age of childhood vaccination is simultaneous, by and large the time the autism symptoms start to manifest, it's very easy as a distressed parent to say the elites to be. tha then when you have people like andrew wakefield out promoting not, not to mention he's been thrown out of the medical profession, it doesn't really matter because if you're looking for a story and someone who even once was an authority is telling you that story, it does something. i can't really explain it, but i do think one thing that's really important is to not be dismissive or patronizing of

people were coming from that point of view because i think that makes people dig in even harder. there needs to be empathy and listening, and then maybe education and evidence but starting with the listening and the empathy. >> does anyone wonder about mrs. x? i was able to discover that mrs. x is or was, in 2013, still living in sweden. in a conversation with my translator, she made it clear she did not want to be interviewed, but she wanted this to be a close chapter in her life. she did say, they did this with out my knowledge and that would never be allowed today. >> given this discussion and the importance with the henrietta lack now becomings more forefront with the movie,

have you seen the movie? do you think it did justice to the issue that was at hand?you e >> the movie was a movie. it was made-for-tv. i thought opera did a tremendous acting job, but you couldn't get in the movie the whole back story about the cells and their use. it was meant to be a drama and that's what it was. i recommend anyone who saw the movie and is intrigued. the book is much richer and offers a lot more and that's often the case with books versus movies. >> this is a comment more than a question. a couple months ago i started working up at johns hopkinste and i work with quite a number of african-american people who are incredibly well-educated and still have fears aboutg visiting certain parts of the hospital.

the effect of that is not just the community that lives around the hospital. it's just huge how much damage c that does. >> the stories you tell us about the other woman who got punished and relegated to the lab you said you would tell us what happened to her. >> while she persisted in herr research and worked, i believe she was hired when she was 70 and she gave an oral history revealing all of what happened about ten years later shortly before she passed away. i greatly admire her. she would not let herself be turned aside and i'm being told it's time. thank you all very much for attending. >> wednesday night on the tv, books covering military

history. at 80 stern, retired admiral james on the history of war warfare and his book seapower. jennifer king on her book world war i, the american soldier experience. james wright discusses his book, and during vietnam. andrew writes about world war i from the perspective of general john in the book my fellow soldiers. it is part of book tv in prime time. all this week on c-span2. >> c-span "washington journal" is live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up wednesday morning we start with the center for urban renewal and education, founder sarah parker on the events in charlottesville and the larger issue of action by all right groups. author michael dobbs talks about the historical parallels between the current nuclear standoff with north korea and the 1962 cuban missile

crisis. life after, tony mcaleer discusses countering hate groups and shares his experience as a former organizer for the resistance. be sure to watch c-span "washington journal" live at 7:00 a.m. wednesday morning. join the discussion. >> we been on the road meeting winners of this year's student documentary competition. at royal oaks high school and relics michigan, first place winner jared won a prize of $3000 for his documentary on the rising cost of pharmaceutical drugs. the second-place prize of $1500 went to classmate mary sire for her documentary on mass incarceration and mandatory minimum sentences and. also, third place winner rebecca messner, $1750 for her

documentary on gender and equality. grace novak won an honorable mention price of $250 for her documentary on the relationship between the police and the media. thank you to all the students who participated in our 2017 student cam video documentary competition. to watch any of the videos, go to student cam.org. student cam 2018 starts in september with the theme, the constitution and you. >> we are asking students to choose any provision of the u.s. constitution and create a video illustrating why the provision is important. >> physician rachel pearson writes about how the u.s. medical system treats the poor in her memoir, no apparent distress. she tells about her education at a medical school in galveston texas. and residency at a free clinic in a small texas town. she talked about her book at the university bookstore in seattle.