Only Brianna seemed at ease. True, the Cherry Hill ninth grader blushed at an oblique allusion to her virginity. But on this September afternoon, she was ready to join this revolutionary war on cancer. To be part of the first generation to combat cervical cancer simply by rolling up its sleeves. She had good reason.
Her neighbor has cervical cancer, Brianna explained, and she'd been telling girls to get vaccinated.
Four thousand miles away, at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, the man whose out-of-the-box thinking in Philadelphia paved the way for the vaccine was asked to reflect on the triumph. Did he feel prescient or vindicated, maybe with a twinge of bitterness?
"I'm pleased, said Harald zur Hausen, 70, with his usual understatement. "It's gratifying."
Forty years ago, during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, zur Hausen suspected that the same virus that caused ordinary warts also seeded cervical cancer.
His hunch was considered outlandish. Not only were researchers closing in on a much likelier viral culprit, but everyone knew warts were harmless. The ubiquitous, cosmetically annoying papillomavirus could not possibly cause half a million cervical cancer diagnoses and 250,000 deaths globally each year.
And yet zur Hausen was right. His lab showed that HPV was a family of viruses, and that the two most dangerous types - both part of the new vaccine - were involved not only in cervical cancer, but also in rarer malignancies. Men and children, as well as women, were vulnerable.
In the end, zur Hausen would also become a prophet of a scarier idea now recognized as truth: Certain viral infections can culminate in cancer. HPV is just one.
