**1. Introduction**

Rabies is a devastating disease that is inexorably fatal, unless – as Louis Pasteur demonstrated [1] – it is rapidly treated by immunization. Even so, the vaccination regimen that Pasteur recommended is punishing, and brought its own risks of hyperinflammation. In the mid-20th century rabies was widespread among wildlife (principally foxes in Europe and raccoons in North America), and even in developed countries the bite of an infected animal was a death warrant if not immediately and intensively treated.

With the advent of genetic engineering (GE) technologies in the 1980s, the renowned Institut Mérieux in Lyon, France – established in 1897 by Marcel Mérieux, one of Louis Pasteur's assistants – brought a new task to the newly established GE company Transgène in Strasbourg: make a rabies vaccine. This chore was handed down to ourselves, two young postdoctoral scientists in the company.

Transgène, founded by Pierre Chambon and Philippe Kourilsky in 1979/1980, although being allocated half a floor in Pierre Chambon's institute at the University of Strasbourg (**Figure 1**), was not quite ready: all available resources, at the very beginning, were allocated to setting up all the essential GE ingredients – oligonucleotide synthesis, DNA sequencing (done manually on thin polyacrylamide gels using radiophosphorus), basic sequence analysis, simple expression vectors in bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cells, even making our own restriction enzymes. Other GE

#### **Figure 1.**

*Transgène and the Wistar Institute. (Left) The Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eukaryotes (LGME) under Pierre Chambon at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Strasbourg (founded 1538), France, where Transgène was housed (6th floor) during the development of the rabies vaccine (1980s). The building was constructed in 1964 and was demolished in 2011 {https://www.archi-wiki.org/Adresse:Facult%C3%A9\_de\_m%C 3%A9decine\_(Strasbourg)}. (Right) Wistar Institute of Anatomy, Philadelphia, USA. The Wistar was founded in 1892, and the Wistar Institute Building was opened in 1894. Image courtesy Jeffrey M. Vinocur 2006. Images are reproduced under Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.*

companies were well ahead, and had cloned and expressed key molecules such as growth hormone, interferons, and hepatitis B surface antigen. We were both overoptimistic and underweight.
