The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

I've read a bit about vaccines in the past few years (and not all of it for my Regulatory Affairs degree). The Vaccine Race is the most complex of the layman's books I've read, covering not just the development of vaccines for rabies and rubella, but the people involved (with their quirks and territorial issues), the techniques used to develop vaccines and their components, the human cost of failed vaccines, intellectual property, fights with bureaucracy (worsened by an NIH official's view of new techniques), aging, medical ethics (and the lack thereof before the mid 1960s) and how one scientist's bad administrative decision effectively stalled his still formidable contributions to the science. Waldman does a reasonable job of integrating all the threads, and wisely chooses to only highlight Leonard Hayflick, whose work in creating the cell line used in many vaccines and other drugs also created the science of aging, and Stanley Plotkin, who developed the measles and rubella vaccines. Still, the enormity of the task means that some sections feel rushed and I wanted to know more about some of the scientists.