In the early 1930s, pertussis (whooping cough) killed up to 75,000 Americans a year, most of them young children and infants. That all changed because of two Grand Rapids scientists, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering. Naturally for the time period they did not receive the recognition they deserved. 

It was the Great Depression. Banks across the country had shut down. Grand Rapids furniture industry had collapsed. Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, bacteriologists for a Michigan state laboratory, worked on their own time to visit sick children at night. They testified: “We listened to sad stories told by desperate fathers who could find no work. We collected specimens by the light of kerosene lamps, from whooping, vomiting, strangling children. We saw what the disease could do.”

In time, they and their team succeeded in developing the first safe and effective whooping cough vaccine. Whooping cough deaths plummeted in the United States and then the world.

Read the full article about their research, opposition they encountered from the medical community, and the abundant support they received from Grand Rapidians in Smithsonian Magazine. 

Statue depicts Kendrick, Eldering, and research assistant Loney Clinton Gordon, an African-American chemist who was hired by Kendrick in 1944. It's located in the Michigan State University Research Center in downtown Grand Rapids.