Google Doodle Honours Creator of the World’s First Chickenpox Vaccine2Photo© gadgets.ndtv.com

Google Doodle Honours Creator of the World’s First Chickenpox Vaccine

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Google on Thursday featured a new Doodle on the search engine's homepage, in a tribute to Dr. Michiaki Takahashi — the creator of the first vaccine against chickenpox, on his 94th birthday. The vaccine, developed in 1974, is still in use today, and has been administered to millions of children, to prevent them from contracting severe cases of the contagious viral disease. The new Google Doodle is currently displayed in India, the US, Australia, Russia, and a few European and South American countries, according to Google.

According to Google's Doodle post honouring the creator of the first vaccine against the varicella virus, Dr. Takahashi was born in 1928 in Japan, and earned his medical degree from Osaka University, before studying measles and polio viruses at the Research Institute for Microbial Disease at the university. Dr. Takahashi moved to the US after accepting a research fellowship in 1963, after which his son contracted a serious case of chickenpox. This prompted Dr. Takahashi to look for a way to combat the contagious disease.

Two years after he moved to the US, Dr. Takahashi was back in Japan, experimenting with weakened chickenpox viruses in 1965. Five years later, the vaccine was ready for human trials, and by 1974, Dr. Takahashi had succeeded in developing the world's first vaccine against the varicella chickenpox virus.