Research partners linked to vaccine 

   Vaccines now considered by many parents to be an integral part of childhood health care got their start with two women scientists who worked for the Michigan Department of Health.
    Drs. Grace Eldering & Pearl Kendrick of Grand Rapids, Michigan directed the first field studies of the whooping cough vaccine and established the effectiveness of mass immunization. In October 1939, the Health Department laboratory began manufacturing and distributing the serum.
     Eldering and Kendrick later combined vaccines for diphtheria, whooping cough & tetanus (DPT), now given as one inoculation.
    A 1934 graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Kendrick began researching whooping cough while serving as Chief of the Western Michigan Branch laboratory of the state Department of Health. At the time, the disease claimed an average of 6,000 lives in the U.S. every year - most of them children under the age of five.
    Dr. Eldering, a bacteriologist, was working with the Health Department in Lansing when Dr. Kendrick asked her to join the research effort. The two researchers later hired Loney Clinton Gordon, an African-American lab technician who helped them work on a bacterium known to cause whooping cough. Because of strains Gordon isolated, Drs. Kendrick and Eldering were able to perform a control experiment that eventually uncovered the successful whooping cough vaccine.

Sources: Michigan Women's Hall of Fame (links above)