Most people want to live longer, and in better health, than nature allows them to. This newsletter tracks efforts to give people more time, no matter how strange the means may be. But while I generally focus on modern technological developments, it’s the breakthroughs of our predecessors which give me hope that further progress is still possible.
Everyone who contracts rabies dies within months…
Being mauled by an angry dog is terrifying enough, but if the animal is rabid, the bites are only the beginning of the horror. Once disease-carrying saliva is introduced into an open wound, rabies virus infiltrates nearby muscle cells and begins to replicate. Soon, it breaches the junctions between muscle cells and peripheral nerves, and at a rate of a few centimetres per day, begins climbing up nerve cells toward the brain1.
During this initial phase, the infected person experiences only subtle symptoms - perhaps a low-grade fever, or tingling near the bite wound. But once the virus reaches the brain, one of two nightmares commences: progressive paralysis or a descent into madness. For about half of patients, any attempt to drink triggers violent, involuntary throat spasms - leading to an overwhelming fear of water despite extreme thirst. Many also cycle between periods of manic rage and moments of terrifying lucidity, fully aware of their deteriorating condition.
The only mercy in this grim progression is its brevity. After about a week of torment – ending either in quiet respiratory failure, or a violent convulsive seizure – death inevitably arrives.
…until Joseph doesn’t.
On July 6, 1895, nine-year-old Joseph Meister becomes the first human test subject for a rabies vaccine. Two-and-a-half days earlier, he had been savagely attacked by his neighbour’s rabid dog, suffering wounds to his hands, legs and thighs. His desperate mother, having heard of Louis Pasteur’s experimental work, made an urgent and uncertain journey to Paris to seek help from the renowned scientist.
Surprisingly, she is in luck. Pasteur, having successfully developed a vaccine for anthrax a few years prior, has been quietly working on the same for rabies. By infecting rabbits with the disease, surgically extracting their spinal cords, and leaving them to dry, he has found a way to inactivate the virus. Dogs injected with a serum made from these dried nerves developed immunity, and so long as the injection was performed prior to symptom onset, every dog tested - without failure - became invulnerable to future infection.
Ten days later, and after twelve injections of progressively more potent vaccines, Joseph is still feeling fine (save for some soreness around the injection sites). Four months pass, and Pasteur receives a letter from Joseph’s mother reporting he remains in perfect health. Word of this miraculous success spreads rapidly. Within a year, Pasteur has treated hundreds of rabies patients from across Europe, and the first vaccination has occurred in America. In 1887, the Institut Pasteur opens in Paris as “a free clinic for rabies treatment, a research center for infectious diseases, and a teaching center.”
As of 2025, Rabies still claims about 60,000 lives annually, almost all in regions with limited healthcare access. Yet with 30 million vaccinations administered yearly, countless lives are saved from what was once a universally fatal disease.
Everyone with severe blood poisoning dies within weeks…
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