Jason Crawford

Later in his career in the 1880s, when he was doing experiments on farm animals to try to figure out what

diseases that they would get.

This picture is of a rabbit, but it was actually, he was doing experiments with chickens and something called chicken collar.

Through a botched experiment, his lab accidentally discovered how to make a vaccine.

And he discovered the mechanism of what is known as attenuated, live attenuated vaccines.

And he immediately realized the importance of this.

He realized that he had been able to do, by accident, through a botched experiment, what no one had done since Jenner.

For generations, for almost 90 years, no one had been able to come up with a vaccine for another disease beyond smallpox, and here he had accidentally done it in the last year.

And he immediately pivoted his attention to that, started creating vaccines for chicken cholera, for anthrax, which affected sheep, for a disease called swine erysipelas.

And then he created the first engineered vaccines in humans, beginning with rabies.

And when word got out, by the way, that he had even a potential rabies vaccine, patients started flocking to his office.

People who'd been bitten by rabid animals and knew that they were at risk of developing rabies, which is a slow moving, a very slow developing disease, by the way.

It takes like a month to really show symptoms and kill you.

And so it's one of the few diseases, by the way, where you can actually benefit by getting the vaccine after you've been exposed.

Um, and so people had been bitten by, you know, rabid dogs and animals started coming into him and say, I heard you have a vaccine.

Please save my son, save my child, save my life.

And so, um, uh, pastor was very reluctant at first, especially when he'd never tested, you know, or it hadn't sufficiently tested the vaccine.

Um, he gave the rabies vaccine to a child who doctors assured him had been bitten so much that he was a goner anyway, save the child's life.

More people come and pastor realizes that, um, he's got to set up a clinic.

He's got to scale this up.