July 6: When the miracle cure brought the end of the world
On July 6, 1885, Pasteur gave the first rabies vaccine to a human. Tonight's film: I Am Legend (2007).
July 6, 1885. A nine-year-old kid arrives from Alsace, his name is Joseph Meister. Two days earlier, at dawn, a rabid dog tore him up. Rabies back then was a death sentence: once the symptoms show, you die, and the symptoms almost always showed. His mother, in desperation, took him to Pasteur. Who was not even a doctor, he was a chemist. Pasteur had already tested his virus, taken from the dried spinal cords of rabbits and grown steadily stronger, on about fifty dogs. Now he injected it into a child. Thirteen shots over ten days. Meister never came down with rabies. He became the first person ever vaccinated against rabies who survived. As a grown man he worked as the concierge of the Pasteur Institute. He spent his days beside the man who had saved him.
And here I stand, looking at this story from its end. There is something that has always nagged at me about sci-fi. Not that it is too optimistic. That we get used to the promise. A genius arrives, and fixes it. Pasteur showed that a virus could be beaten. And we have been coasting on that ever since, sure that the next wonder drug will sort everything out too.
That is honestly a little of why I am worn thinner these days. Every new thing gets sold as the last one we will ever need. An AI that replaces everyone. A drug that cures everything. Then comes the fine print.
You know what is wrong with all that? It rests on a promise. And that is exactly the promise I Am Legend (2007) kicks to pieces.
Francis Lawrence’s film. Will Smith is Robert Neville, an Army virologist, alone, okay, with his dog, in an emptied-out New York. He hunts deer through the overgrown streets, broadcasts on the radio for anyone still alive, and has built himself a lab in the basement. Because he believes there is a cure. Because the key is in his own blood. And because the virus that took everything was originally a cancer drug. They said it would cure cancer. Instead it snuffed out the world.
This is the part where the film lands for me. Not the monsters. But because it takes the exact promise that saved Joseph Meister and flips it. Science fixes it, well, sometimes science is the problem. Neville is doing exactly what Pasteur did: hunting for a compound, risking it, believing in it. Except in his case the compound is what destroyed the world. Same faith. Same basement. Just a different outcome.
Okay, I wandered off the point. I meant to talk about the film.
I am not telling you I Am Legend is brilliant. Will Smith carries the slow unraveling of a man alone, and the dog scenes are going to hurt your eyes for good reason. The CGI monsters, though, well, it is 2007, sorry. But it gets the mood right. The empty city. The grass pushing up through the asphalt. And the feeling of one man who still believes there is a point in trying, when everyone else gave up long ago.
So tonight, press play. Watch Neville go down to the basement day after day, wrestling with the test tubes, because he believes in the compound that might undo it all. And then think about that boy in Alsace, saved by an injection on July 6, 1885. Same faith. One gives life, the other leaves behind an empty planet.
What else could have been tonight
Two other July 6 events that would have stood in just as well tonight:
1942: The Frank family goes into hiding in Amsterdam. Anne is thirteen. They are running from a regime that had decided who may live and who may not, and their names were not on the list. Logan’s Run (1976) takes that same idea and folds it into a bright, futuristic shell: a society where everyone must die at thirty, and anyone who bolts, a “runner,” is hunted down. Anne fled out of real history, the Logan’s Run fugitives out of a well-lit future. The motif is the same: a system that decides who has the right to live.
Early July 1947: A rancher, Mac Brazel, finds strange metallic wreckage in his field in New Mexico and hauls it to the sheriff in Roswell. The local Army base first puts out a press release about a literal “flying disc,” then walks it back and calls it a weather balloon. The whole American dread of alien invasion has lived off that moment ever since. Signs (2002) carries that unease straight into one farming family’s daily life: the aliens do not arrive on the news, they arrive in the middle of your own cornfield. Since Roswell the thing has lived in our heads; Signs just shows what it looks like when it suddenly stands in your yard.
Sources
The main event: the first rabies vaccination in a human, July 6, 1885
PNAS, “1885, the first rabies vaccination in humans” (Joseph Meister, nine years old, from Alsace, bitten July 4, arrived July 6; Pasteur had tested on ~50 dogs): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1414226111
Institut Pasteur, “The final years 1877–1887” (13 injections over ten days, of progressively fresher, more virulent rabbit spinal cord): https://www.pasteur.fr/en/institut-pasteur/history/troisieme-epoque-1877-1887
PMC, “Inner Workings: 1885, the first rabies vaccination in humans” (the July 7–16 inoculation series): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4151773/
Tonight’s film: I Am Legend (2007)
Wikipedia, “I Am Legend (film)” (Will Smith as virologist Robert Neville; the cancer-curing mutated measles virus; the Darkseekers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Legend_(film)
“Genetics and Ethics in the I am Legend Corpus”, PMC (the Krippin virus and the virologist’s role): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9764423/
The side events
Anne Frank and her family go into hiding (July 6, 1942), Anne Frank House: https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/137/the-frank-family-goes-into-hiding/
Logan’s Run (1976), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan’s_Run_(film)
The Roswell incident (1947), Wikipedia (Mac Brazel’s debris and the “flying disc” press release): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
Signs (2002), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signs_(2002_film)