... injecting their genetic material into their host’s cells and causing things like ebola, the plague, epidemics of influenza, of just the plain old nasty rhinovirus — aka the common “cold.” So viruses are “bad.” But not always. It was the discovery by Dr. Edward Jenner that the workers milking cows who caught a slightly uncomfortable disease called “cowpox” never caught the far more dangerous and deadly “smallpox.” This observation opened the door to a whole new portal of medical treatment ...
... much further than that. We’ve seen documentaries concerning smallpox, the epidemic which is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century alone. It was a terrible time for humanity. But that was before a British doctor named Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids infected with a milder virus called cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. And soon we had the first mass vaccination. And smallpox was stopped in its tracks. No one fears smallpox anymore. We thought we no longer had to dread ...
