#NowReading "Vaccinnated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases". The story of Maurice Hilleman, whom you have probably never heard of. He is the father of the modern vaccine. 
These pages of the book are wow!! Spellbinding piece of history of how Pasteur gave the first successful rabies vaccine to Joseph Meister, a 9-year old boy bitten by a rabid dog. This was at a time when people with rabies were hunted down and murdered.
How was this vaccine made?By drying the spinal cords of rabbits who had died of rabies. It had been tried in dogs and was found to be effective, but had never been given to a human.
Pasteur took great risks that gave him sleepless nights. But it worked. Meister survived and never developed rabies. But as the vaccine was given to more and more people, it was found to cause paralysis in 1 of about 200 people due to reasons not known then.
The story however has a sad ending. Meister, who later worked as a guard at the Pasteur Institute, committed suicide at age 60 as he could not handle the humiliation of opening up of his saviour's tomb to Nazi invaders.
