I really enjoyed this piece in The Guardian last week about the recent 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Salk, who developed the most used polio vaccine:
Jonas Salk Google doodle: a good reminder of the power of vaccines
The importance of this vaccine can't be overstated - a devastating, incurable illness with long-lasting effects on thousands of sufferers and their families has been eradicated from almost every country on the globe in just a couple of generations. It's truly one of the great achievements of public health research.
The article gives an idea of the scale of the undertaking, and the combination of different steps forward from dozens of scientist working in many areas, including e.g. cell line development. And then I discovered I had yet another reason to recommend it - I noticed it's written by an old school friend of mine, Pete Etchells, who is now a lecturer in Biological Psychology at Bath Spa university and writing regularly for the Guardian.