Charles Merieux; Scientist Led Vaccine Lab
Charles Merieux, a French scientist who combined his medical knowledge with industrial savvy to develop one of the world’s leading vaccine laboratories, has died.
Ill for more than a year, Merieux died on Jan. 18 in Lyon, the city of his birth. He was 94.
In his 60-year career, Merieux worked with some of the leading scientists in the world, including Jonas Salk. Under Merieux’s leadership, his family firm mass produced immunizations used broadly in the 1950s to fight polio.
Two decades later, the Merieux laboratory rose to the occasion again, mass producing vaccine that effectively quelled an outbreak of African meningitis in Brazil.
Born in 1907, Merieux received a doctorate in medicine and was a former student at the Pasteur Institute.
His father, Marcel, was a biologist, and when he died in 1937, his son took over his microbiology laboratory, which was mainly devoted to producing vaccines against foot-and-mouth disease.
During World War II, Merieux expanded the laboratory’s operations to produce serum to give to children suffering from malnutrition. Besides these official activities, Merieux also produced plasma for wounded French Resistance fighters. His wife, Simone, used to deliver the plasma to the fighters on her bicycle.
When the war ended, Merieux was sent to the United States on an official mission by the French Health Ministry to study the U.S. system for blood transfusions. The trip convinced him that the future of biology lay in using industrial techniques.
In 1947, he helped found the French Institute of Foot-and-Mouth Disease and used in vitro cultivation to produce millions of doses of vaccines.
Branches of the institute were set up in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and the former Soviet Union, and the organization was renamed the Merieux Institute.
In 1967, Merieux’s son Alain took over the institute, going into partnership with the French chemicals company Rhone-Poulenc. In 1989 a joint venture with the Pasteur Institute gave birth to Pasteur Merieux Connaught--which became the world’s No. 1 producer of vaccines for humans.
Merieux also founded the Marcel Merieux Foundation, dedicated to research and training in biology and health studies. The foundation and the Merieux Institute played a major role in the 1974 program of vaccination against meningitis in Brazil.
Merieux founded Bioforce Development, a group that trains technicians to work with nongovernmental organizations. He also founded the high-security P4 laboratory in Lyon in 1999 to study hemorrhagic fevers.
A widower, he was survived by two children and 11 grandchildren.
