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The MMR vaccine was developed by Maurice Hilleman. It was licensed for use in USA by Merck in 1971. Stand-alone measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines had been previously licensed in 1963, 1967, and 1969, respectively. Recommendations for a second dose were introduced in 1989.

Of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended in American vaccine schedules, Hilleman and his team developed eight: those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria. During the "1957-1958 Asian flu pandemic", his vaccine is believed to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. He also played a role in the discovery of antigenic shift and drift, the cold-producing adenoviruses, the hepatitis viruses, and the potentially cancer-causing virus SV40.


His family belonged to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

He won a fellowship to the University of Chicago and received his doctoral degree in microbiology in 1944. His doctoral thesis was on chlamydia infections, which were then thought to be caused by a virus.

After joining E.R. Squibb & Sons (now Bristol-Myers Squibb), Hilleman developed a vaccine against Japanese B encephalitis, a disease that threatened American troops in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II. As chief of the Department of Respiratory Diseases at Army Medical Center (now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) from 1948 to 1957, Hilleman discovered the genetic changes that occur when the influenza virus mutates, known as antigenic shift and Antigenic drift, which he theorized would mean that a yearly influenza vaccination would be necessary

In 1957, Hilleman joined Merck & Co. (Kenilworth, New Jersey), as head of its new virus and cell biology research department in West Point, Pennsylvania. It was at Merck that Hilleman developed most of the forty experimental and licensed animal and human vaccines for which he is credited

Hilleman was among the first to recognize that a 1957 outbreak of influenza in Hong Kong could become a huge pandemic.

SV40
Hilleman was one of the vaccine pioneers to warn about the possibility that simian viruses might contaminate vaccines.. The best-known of these viruses is SV40, a viral contaminant of the polio vaccine, whose discovery led to the recall of Salk's vaccine in 1961 and its replacement with Albert Sabin's oral vaccine.

In his later life, Hilleman advised the World Health Organization. He retired as senior vice president of the Merck Research Labs in 1984 at its mandatory retirement age of 65. He then directed the newly created Merck Institute for Vaccinology where he worked for the next twenty years until his death in 2005

Hilleman was a forceful man yet at the same time, modest in his claims. None of his vaccines or discoveries are named after him. He ran his laboratory like a military unit, and he was the one in command. For a time, he kept a row of "shrunken heads" (actually fakes made by one of his children) in his office as trophies representing each of his fired employees. He used profanity and tirades freely to drive his arguments home, and once, famously, refused to attend a mandatory "charm school" course intended to make Merck middle managers more civil.

In March 2005, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in collaboration with The Merck Company Foundation, announced the creation of The Maurice R. Hilleman Chair in Vaccinology

Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), said in 2005: "If I had to name a person who has done more for the benefit of human health, with less recognition than anyone else, it would be Maurice Hilleman. Maurice should be recognized as the most successful vaccinologist in history.

In 2005, Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that Hilleman's contributions were "the best kept secret among the lay public

In 2007, Paul Offit published a biography of Hilleman, entitled Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases