Matt Kaplan

Just triple the liquid and you've got it.

And the smell apparently is bad.

I've not ever seen chicken cholera in first person, nor do I really want to.

Agreed.

Yeah, yeah, much better.

So anthrax was affecting livestock all across Europe, and there was a desperate need to create a vaccine against it.

And earlier on in his career, Pasteur knew about this veterinarian named Henri Toussaint.

And Henri Toussaint had said, you know, I think a way to create a vaccine against anthrax

Chicken cholera and then anthrax is to kill whatever the microbe is that is causing this.

So he started messing with heat to heat treat samples and then inject them into animals.

And the animals, he noted, would get ill but then not die and then become resistant to the disease afterwards.

And Pasteur had been on the record saying, I think...

you are totally off.

I think that killing the microbe isn't helpful.

I think we need to weaken it.

And so he was a big proponent of using oxygen to weaken bacteria so that you could create a vaccine with a pathogen that was weak but not destroyed.

And he said, Henry Toussaint is totally wrong.

In the end, there was tremendous pressure for Pasteur to be able to deliver an anthrax vaccine.

And he did deliver in a very public way by injecting

All of these sheep with anthrax, half of them had been vaccinated with Pasteur's vaccine, and none of the ones that had been vaccinated died.