ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

- Why didn’t some of you get sick?
- You had vaccines!
• What are vaccines?
• IMMUNIZATIONS/VACCINES
- We have immune systems. When our immune system encounters something foreign (like a virus) it
makes an antibody that is specifi c to the foreign particle. These antibodies fi ght and kill the virus.
- But it takes time to make antibodies, so we get vaccinations.
• A vaccine is an injection of a weakened form of a virus. Our body makes antibodies and can easily fi ght off
the virus.
• Our body then keeps a few of the antibodies around.
• When we encounter the virus (full strength) later in life after having the vaccine, our bodies can quickly
copy the antibodies and fi ght off the virus.
Welton Taylor - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Family Moves to Chicago: My father was the fi rst African American to have a business on Main
Street downtown of Birmingham, Alabama. Taylor the Tailor. He had a tailor shop. My mother did the seamstress
work. He was a tailor, trained at Talladega [College]. And he had a shop downtown. Well, my mother
and my ninety-fi ve year old cousin, who I went to see yesterday, who was twelve years old at the time, came out
of the shop and were stopped at the curb because the Ku Klux Klan was walking down the street, led by three
men on white horses at the front of the column. And one of the horses stumbled, and the rider was thrown.
And his cap came off. And my mother looked at him and said, “I know you.” And I have this on tape from my
cousin. She says, “I wish you had broken your dat-blamed neck.” That was not the best thing to say under the
circumstances, in a crowd where a lot of people heard it, especially since the man who fell off the horse, leading
the Ku Klux Klan was the banker who owned the mortgage on our house and the shop. You wouldn’t have said
that that was politically correct under any kind of conditions. But that’s the way it worked out. Well, it wasn’t
long after that--I don’t know the time span, but it was shortly after that, that three Klan riders came up to our
back door and rapped on the door with a riding crop. My mother opened the door, and they said, “You have two
weeks to get out of Alabama or be a widow.” I was four months old, and my mother did not desire widowhood
at that time and at that place. Two weeks to the day, we were on the Illinois Central [Railroad] headed north to
Chicago.
Clip 2 - Father’s Advice: “Times change, things change and people change.” He says, “You fi x yourself to
do the job that you want to do, and the job will fi nd you.” And boy, that has been my credo. It has happened
a dozens of times since then. The job will fi nd you. So that’s where I’ve gotten, the job has been fi nding me.
When I went overseas for WHO [World Health Organization] and lived in Europe, and six months in France
and six months in England, at the Pasteur Institute in France, working research with them, and in England,
working with research at the Collindale Central Public Health Laboratory of England. I was there by request
because the chief microbiologist of the World Health Organization was interested in the fact that nobody
seemed to be paying any attention to salmonella problems in the United States. And they were very big in
Europe, always have been. And they kill a lot of people in Europe. Here, where the food is theoretically fi t to
eat and the water is fi t to drink. Salmonellosis is just an upset stomach, two or three days of diarrhea. You don’t
call the doctor. You get over it. You say, it must have been something I ate and let it go at that. But the refugee
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