The Man Known as Hilleman
Content
Hilleman sent samples of Asian flu virus to six American-based companies that
made influenza vaccine. He figured that if he were to have any hope of saving
American lives, he would have to convince companies to make and distribute
vaccine in four months. Influenza vaccine had never been made that quickly.
Hilleman sped up the process by ignoring the Division of Biologics Standards, the
principal vaccine regulatory agency in the United States. “I knew how the system
worked,” he said. “So I bypassed the Division of Biologics Standards, called the
manufacturers myself, and moved the process quickly.
Hilleman’s committee-of-one approach would be hard to duplicate today. No
American-based companies make inactivated influenza vaccine; the three
companies that provide vaccine to the United States are headquartered in France,
Switzerland, and Belgium. And regulatory control of vaccines by the U. S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) would be impossible to ignore.
Hilleman knew that he would have a tough time convincing people to try his
vaccine. So he turned to the one group he was certain would take it—midlevel
executives in his own company. “I went to a meeting for marketing, sales,
production, and research,” recalled Hilleman, “and I headed up the meeting. And I
said, ‘Look, guys, our next product is going to be a hepatitis B vaccine, but I need
to have volunteers.’ I said, ‘Here are the consent forms. Just sign these and I’ll
collect them after the meeting, and then I’ll figure out who are the chosen people.’”
Hilleman soon found that he hadn’t been very persuasive. “There wasn’t a da**
one of them that sent in the form,” he said. At the next meeting Hilleman made it
clear that the consent form didn’t contain “No” as an option. “I said, ‘I need
volunteers, da** it. Just decide who among you are going to take this vaccine.
Joan Staub, one of those asked to take the vaccine, remembers things differently.
“Consent forms? What consent forms?” she asked. “We got that vaccine because
we had to get it. If Hilleman told you to do something, you did it.”
Hilleman’s coercion of Merck employees to get his hepatitis B vaccine was just
one example of his tough, profane, and demanding style.
“We worked hard, seven days a week,” recalled Hilleman. “If I ever caught
anybody delaying a set of tests because [results] might come out on a weekend, it
would be grounds for dismissal.
Now Merck tells [employees] that they don’t need to put in any extra time and that
you have to balance your life. And that you have to have enjoyment with your job;
[that way] you can do a better job and have fun. It’s all just a pile of s***. What the
company should be doing is kicking a**. But that’s from the old school. I was told
that I had a very unusual management style.”
Hilleman demanded from others what he demanded from himself. “He was totally
fixated on what he did,” recalled Bert Peltier, former vice president of medical
affairs at Merck. “He didn’t play cards or have any particular hobbies. He didn’t
take a lot of vacations. He’d hit the office, and he was just totally at it all day long.
He didn’t relax very much at all. He was absolutely and totally dedicated to what
he was doing. And he could be intimidating. He tended to run roughshod over
people below him. He didn’t wait around for all of the niceties. He just wanted to
do it.”
Staub recalled that Hilleman would occasionally show disdain for scientists whose
work he didn’t respect. One day we were all assembled in a large room, and
Hilleman wasn’t buying what this guy was saying. Before long I heard a little
click, click, click going on a couple of rows behind me. What Maurice had done to
show his boredom was that he was back there cutting his nails.”
NOTHING WAS MORE INTIMIDATING ABOUT HILLEMAN THAN HIS
relentless profanity. “He liked to curse,” recalled former Merck CEO Roy Vagelos.
“He had language that characterized his being, and he brought that wherever he
went. And he never changed.” Hilleman recalled, “I remember that at about age
three, I was sitting on the kitchen table while [Aunt Edith] was putting on my long
stockings. I had the sudden urge to practice my gradually increasing vocabulary.
And I said, ‘Oh, f***.’ Swat. And I was lying prone on my side. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘What a powerful word. I wonder what it means.’”
Although Hilleman’s daughters Jeryl and Kirsten were never victims of his
profanity, they occasionally heard cursing around the house and picked it up.
By the mid–1960s, hoping to make better, happier workers, Merck hired several
psychologists to help senior executives with their management techniques. Max
Tishler had the unenviable task of asking Hilleman to go to these group sessions.
(Tishler couldn’t possibly have been paid enough money to do this.)
Tishler later said, “Usually when people came into my office they left shaking. But
when Maurice came into my office, I’m the guy who was shaking.” Hilleman
never attended the sessions.
Although Hilleman’s tirades were legendary, one meeting stands apart from all the
rest, recorded in a memo still discussed among Merck employees twenty-five years
later. They call it “the truck driver memo.” Hilleman’s explosion resulted from the
confluence of several events. When Hilleman was making his hepatitis B vaccine,
he was adamant that his method of inactivation be followed precisely. If not, he
feared that children might be injected with live deadly hepatitis B virus. But
Hilleman’s research group didn’t make the vaccine; Merck’s manufacturing
division did. And the manufacturing division was controlled by the unions: the
Teamsters Union (hence truck drivers) and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers
Union. Hilleman, who demanded total control, didn’t control the employees who
made his vaccines. Roy Vagelos remembers the conflict between Hilleman and
the manufacturing division. “[Hilleman] was from Walter Reed, which is military.
All you had to do was walk into his [laboratory] to realize that he had transformed
[the department of] virus and cell biology at Merck into a military organization.
Everybody knew what to do at the beginning of every day. Well, that worked in
virus and cell biology, but when he started to transfer the process to manufacturing,
the people [there] weren’t quite used to that. And so there was a constant rumble at
the end of the campus, where the transfer of technology took place.” On August 15,
1980, the rumble turned into a roar. Hilleman found out that someone in the
manufacturing division—in hopes of increasing production—had slightly changed
his chemical inactivation process for hepatitis B vaccine. Hilleman knew that
no test existed for detecting very small quantities of live hepatitis B virus, that
there was no safety net if a modified process didn’t kill every single infectious
hepatitis particle. And he knew that children would be at risk. So he gathered the
manufacturers together in a small, non–air-conditioned room at the far end of
Merck’s West Point campus and told them what he thought about their idea. “There
is no f***ing test for absolute safety except to put the vaccine in f***ing man,”
said Hilleman. “A procedure was developed to make the f***ing vaccine and was
shown to make the vaccine safe. Then there are always f***ing people who want
to make f***ing brownie points by changing the process to
get more yield. You have to adhere to the g*dd**n process. We know that the
vaccine is safe, but you have to adhere to the g*dd**n process. What worries me is
that [someone] will get a bonus if he can get more yield, so he changes the f***ing
process. G*dd**n meatheads are everywhere.” Hilleman knew that for biological
products like vaccines the manufacturing process was everything.
He was obsessed about thesafety of his vaccine. And he was intolerant of those
whose work ethic was less stringent than his (which was pretty much everybody).
“Maurice always wanted to have very tight control over everything that he did,”
recalled Peltier. “He tolerated fools terribly.”
If employees didn’t meet his rigorous demands, Hilleman fired them, later lining
up their shrunken heads like trophies behind his desk. “One of my favorite gifts
was a shrunken head kit,” recalled Maurice’s younger daughter, Kirsten. “It
involved carving apples; inserting assorted grotesque teeth, eyes, and hair; and
allowing them to dehydrate [for] several weeks. My dad saw an apparent
remarkable resemblance in one of my shrunken heads to an employee he had
recently terminated. He carted it off to work and installed it in the cabinet behind
his desk. Finding this enormously funny, he put me to work carving the heads of
his most memorable terminations.
Despite his iron hand and frightening manner, Hilleman’s coworkers were fiercely
devoted to him.
"There was a day called Black Friday in the 1970s where Merck laid off people, a
lot of people. I had never seen Merck lay off people until that day. Not one person
in virus and cell biology was touched, and that was because of Maurice. We were
afraid of him. There was no doubt. But he protected us.”
“Today decisions are reached by achieving consensus among committee
members,” she said. “Maurice had a committee. It was a committee of one. We did
what the man wanted, and we did it how he wanted. He was a man of his time. If
he showed up at Merck today, he couldn’t do it.”
made influenza vaccine. He figured that if he were to have any hope of saving
American lives, he would have to convince companies to make and distribute
vaccine in four months. Influenza vaccine had never been made that quickly.
Hilleman sped up the process by ignoring the Division of Biologics Standards, the
principal vaccine regulatory agency in the United States. “I knew how the system
worked,” he said. “So I bypassed the Division of Biologics Standards, called the
manufacturers myself, and moved the process quickly.
Hilleman’s committee-of-one approach would be hard to duplicate today. No
American-based companies make inactivated influenza vaccine; the three
companies that provide vaccine to the United States are headquartered in France,
Switzerland, and Belgium. And regulatory control of vaccines by the U. S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) would be impossible to ignore.
Hilleman knew that he would have a tough time convincing people to try his
vaccine. So he turned to the one group he was certain would take it—midlevel
executives in his own company. “I went to a meeting for marketing, sales,
production, and research,” recalled Hilleman, “and I headed up the meeting. And I
said, ‘Look, guys, our next product is going to be a hepatitis B vaccine, but I need
to have volunteers.’ I said, ‘Here are the consent forms. Just sign these and I’ll
collect them after the meeting, and then I’ll figure out who are the chosen people.’”
Hilleman soon found that he hadn’t been very persuasive. “There wasn’t a da**
one of them that sent in the form,” he said. At the next meeting Hilleman made it
clear that the consent form didn’t contain “No” as an option. “I said, ‘I need
volunteers, da** it. Just decide who among you are going to take this vaccine.
Joan Staub, one of those asked to take the vaccine, remembers things differently.
“Consent forms? What consent forms?” she asked. “We got that vaccine because
we had to get it. If Hilleman told you to do something, you did it.”
Hilleman’s coercion of Merck employees to get his hepatitis B vaccine was just
one example of his tough, profane, and demanding style.
“We worked hard, seven days a week,” recalled Hilleman. “If I ever caught
anybody delaying a set of tests because [results] might come out on a weekend, it
would be grounds for dismissal.
Now Merck tells [employees] that they don’t need to put in any extra time and that
you have to balance your life. And that you have to have enjoyment with your job;
[that way] you can do a better job and have fun. It’s all just a pile of s***. What the
company should be doing is kicking a**. But that’s from the old school. I was told
that I had a very unusual management style.”
Hilleman demanded from others what he demanded from himself. “He was totally
fixated on what he did,” recalled Bert Peltier, former vice president of medical
affairs at Merck. “He didn’t play cards or have any particular hobbies. He didn’t
take a lot of vacations. He’d hit the office, and he was just totally at it all day long.
He didn’t relax very much at all. He was absolutely and totally dedicated to what
he was doing. And he could be intimidating. He tended to run roughshod over
people below him. He didn’t wait around for all of the niceties. He just wanted to
do it.”
Staub recalled that Hilleman would occasionally show disdain for scientists whose
work he didn’t respect. One day we were all assembled in a large room, and
Hilleman wasn’t buying what this guy was saying. Before long I heard a little
click, click, click going on a couple of rows behind me. What Maurice had done to
show his boredom was that he was back there cutting his nails.”
NOTHING WAS MORE INTIMIDATING ABOUT HILLEMAN THAN HIS
relentless profanity. “He liked to curse,” recalled former Merck CEO Roy Vagelos.
“He had language that characterized his being, and he brought that wherever he
went. And he never changed.” Hilleman recalled, “I remember that at about age
three, I was sitting on the kitchen table while [Aunt Edith] was putting on my long
stockings. I had the sudden urge to practice my gradually increasing vocabulary.
And I said, ‘Oh, f***.’ Swat. And I was lying prone on my side. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘What a powerful word. I wonder what it means.’”
Although Hilleman’s daughters Jeryl and Kirsten were never victims of his
profanity, they occasionally heard cursing around the house and picked it up.
By the mid–1960s, hoping to make better, happier workers, Merck hired several
psychologists to help senior executives with their management techniques. Max
Tishler had the unenviable task of asking Hilleman to go to these group sessions.
(Tishler couldn’t possibly have been paid enough money to do this.)
Tishler later said, “Usually when people came into my office they left shaking. But
when Maurice came into my office, I’m the guy who was shaking.” Hilleman
never attended the sessions.
Although Hilleman’s tirades were legendary, one meeting stands apart from all the
rest, recorded in a memo still discussed among Merck employees twenty-five years
later. They call it “the truck driver memo.” Hilleman’s explosion resulted from the
confluence of several events. When Hilleman was making his hepatitis B vaccine,
he was adamant that his method of inactivation be followed precisely. If not, he
feared that children might be injected with live deadly hepatitis B virus. But
Hilleman’s research group didn’t make the vaccine; Merck’s manufacturing
division did. And the manufacturing division was controlled by the unions: the
Teamsters Union (hence truck drivers) and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers
Union. Hilleman, who demanded total control, didn’t control the employees who
made his vaccines. Roy Vagelos remembers the conflict between Hilleman and
the manufacturing division. “[Hilleman] was from Walter Reed, which is military.
All you had to do was walk into his [laboratory] to realize that he had transformed
[the department of] virus and cell biology at Merck into a military organization.
Everybody knew what to do at the beginning of every day. Well, that worked in
virus and cell biology, but when he started to transfer the process to manufacturing,
the people [there] weren’t quite used to that. And so there was a constant rumble at
the end of the campus, where the transfer of technology took place.” On August 15,
1980, the rumble turned into a roar. Hilleman found out that someone in the
manufacturing division—in hopes of increasing production—had slightly changed
his chemical inactivation process for hepatitis B vaccine. Hilleman knew that
no test existed for detecting very small quantities of live hepatitis B virus, that
there was no safety net if a modified process didn’t kill every single infectious
hepatitis particle. And he knew that children would be at risk. So he gathered the
manufacturers together in a small, non–air-conditioned room at the far end of
Merck’s West Point campus and told them what he thought about their idea. “There
is no f***ing test for absolute safety except to put the vaccine in f***ing man,”
said Hilleman. “A procedure was developed to make the f***ing vaccine and was
shown to make the vaccine safe. Then there are always f***ing people who want
to make f***ing brownie points by changing the process to
get more yield. You have to adhere to the g*dd**n process. We know that the
vaccine is safe, but you have to adhere to the g*dd**n process. What worries me is
that [someone] will get a bonus if he can get more yield, so he changes the f***ing
process. G*dd**n meatheads are everywhere.” Hilleman knew that for biological
products like vaccines the manufacturing process was everything.
He was obsessed about thesafety of his vaccine. And he was intolerant of those
whose work ethic was less stringent than his (which was pretty much everybody).
“Maurice always wanted to have very tight control over everything that he did,”
recalled Peltier. “He tolerated fools terribly.”
If employees didn’t meet his rigorous demands, Hilleman fired them, later lining
up their shrunken heads like trophies behind his desk. “One of my favorite gifts
was a shrunken head kit,” recalled Maurice’s younger daughter, Kirsten. “It
involved carving apples; inserting assorted grotesque teeth, eyes, and hair; and
allowing them to dehydrate [for] several weeks. My dad saw an apparent
remarkable resemblance in one of my shrunken heads to an employee he had
recently terminated. He carted it off to work and installed it in the cabinet behind
his desk. Finding this enormously funny, he put me to work carving the heads of
his most memorable terminations.
Despite his iron hand and frightening manner, Hilleman’s coworkers were fiercely
devoted to him.
"There was a day called Black Friday in the 1970s where Merck laid off people, a
lot of people. I had never seen Merck lay off people until that day. Not one person
in virus and cell biology was touched, and that was because of Maurice. We were
afraid of him. There was no doubt. But he protected us.”
“Today decisions are reached by achieving consensus among committee
members,” she said. “Maurice had a committee. It was a committee of one. We did
what the man wanted, and we did it how he wanted. He was a man of his time. If
he showed up at Merck today, he couldn’t do it.”
