Editor's note: Voice of the Chinese Academy of Sciences occasionally draws a "small picture of the history of science" to introduce a piece of science history and the story behind it.
Rabies is a terrible infectious disease. In the 19th century, when it took the lives of hundreds of French people every year, there was no vaccine or immunoglobulin, and to deal with rabies, people had to use red-hot iron rods to "burn" invisible pathogens. But such a primitive and cruel approach, there is no way to treat rabies. French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur changed all that!
Pasteur began research on the prevention of rabies in 1882. At the beginning of the study of rabies, the virus had not yet been discovered. What the pathogen is, where it is, everything is not known, everything is starting from scratch. Therefore, the first step in the study was to find the rabies pathogen.
Pasteur first chose to look from the saliva of the rabid dog. Since rabies can infect people when they bite people, there must be rabies pathogens in the saliva of rabies. Pasteur and his assistants risked collecting rabid dogs' saliva and then inociating them with the rabbits, which did replicate rabies on rabbits, but could not be seen under a microscope. Pasteur determined that the infested pathogen was a tiny microorganism that Pasteur called "Virus."
After several animal experiments, Pasteur finally deduced that the rabies virus should be concentrated in the nervous system, so he boldly removed a small piece of spinal cord from the sick rabbit and hung it in a sterile flask to make it "dry". He deduced that the virus in the spinal cord after drying was dead, at least very faint. He ground up dried spinal cord tissue and added water to make a vaccine, injected it into the brains of dogs, and then exposed the vaccinated dogs to the deadly virus. After repeated experiments, vaccinated dogs, even if they are injected with rabies virus, will not get sick. Pasteur is pleased to announce the successful development of a rabies vaccine!
On 6 July 1885, 9-year-old boy Joseph Meister, accompanied by his family, hurried from the Alsace region of northeastern France to Paris to the Pasteur Laboratory. Joseph was attacked by a mad dog, with 14 deep bites all over his body, and could barely walk. Although Pasteur was confident in the success of the rabies vaccine experiment in dogs, he was now dealing with a boy who was very careful about whether he should be vaccinated against the boy. In order not to watch the boy die, he decided to give the first rabies vaccine to humans. Pasteur gave the teenager 13 shots of vaccines of different toxicity in a row for 10 days. A month later, the teenager returned home safely as usual.
Pasteur became the first person in the world to save lives from rabies. Rabies vaccine was first used in humans, ushering in a new era of vaccines.
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