ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Life Science
problem in Europe, salmonella hits those refugee camps. It lays people out for the dead wagon wall-to-wall.
And so they wanted, since I had been publishing on that, and I was at Swift [and Company] at the time, they
wanted to know about it. So they called me and asked me if I accepted, would accept a grant from the National
Institutes of Health [NIH] and come over and work with them. So my father was right. The job will fi nd you.
Clip 3 - Inspired by Louis Pasteur: He attacked problems in fi elds that didn’t even exist. He was a chemist.
So, anyway, everything I learned about Louis Pasteur, and I said, that’s for me. I want to be a microbiological
detective, solve problems.
Clip 4 - Work at University of Illinois:
No sooner than I got into it [position in microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign], things
hit the fan my fi rst day on the job. And he said, Taylor, go down to the hospital and get a patient down there
with gas gangrene. And you’ve worked with botulism, and that’s all in the same family, Clostridia. Go down
there, and see what you can do. I went down there, and I watched them operate on this young guy. He had
been on a motorcycle accident and threw him over the handlebars and slid along in the gutter like that. And
[his] wrists were all lacerated, and they were cleaning it all up. And they found that he had crepitation gas in
there, it means gas gangrene had set in. And they’re trying to save his hand and his arm. And so they’re cleaning
out the wound, and I stand there looking at them, waiting for to give me a specimen. And fi nally the nurse
pops up and says--after it’s all cleaned out, said, “Don’t you think we should give microbiology a specimen?”
The doctor says, “Oh, yes.” And he takes a sterile swab and dips it in a nice, clean wound that’s all cleaned out
and gives me the swab. And my reputation was made from that moment on. I said, “I don’t want the soup. I
want the meat.” And I dived down into the wastebasket and got one of those orange gauze pads with all the pus
and corruption on it. And when I called back the next day and told them that not only did he have gas gangrene,
he also had tetanus. And I said, “Look up his record and see if he’s a veteran, cause if he’s a veteran like me,
he’s been inoculated against tetanus. And that’s why he’s not showing the symptoms of tetanus. He’s only
showing gas gangrene, which he has not been inoculated for…” So as of that day, I got a nickname, Blood and
Guts Taylor.
Well, it was all uphill from then--or I should say all downhill. I published at the rate of fi ve papers a year. If
nobody else got money for animals or anything else that I needed, I got it fi rst. The department wasn’t publishing
fi ve papers a year. I was publishing fi ve papers a year by myself. I published some 20 or 30 papers with
the university in the period of the next fi ve years. And I worked out all the details on preventing gas gangrene,
and now, I would say anthrax and tetanus, the wound organisms that kill, and wound botulism. And I worked at
how to do it, what to do it with, and not to have to give people tetanus shots, which had antitoxin in it because
people were dying of anaphylactic shock because they had had horse serum antitoxin somewhere else in their
life. If they had ever had it before, you can’t ever give it to them again. If they had it as children for diphtheria
and you gave it to them for a wound to prevent tetanus, they died, within two or three minutes…I remember a
case where the doctor was gonna do a boy that stepped on a pitchfork, farmer’s kid. And it ran through his foot.
They pulled the pitchfork out and sent him to the doctor. And the doctor said, “Have you ever had any other
inoculations?” The kid didn’t know. He said, “Well, we’ll fi nd out,” gave him a little inoculation in the skin to
see if there was a reaction to it. There was no reaction. He said, “Well, I’ll be on the safe side anyway.” I will
put the, what they call atropine now; it had a different name then, to restart the heart. “I will put that syringe
here full, and I’ll take this one and I’ll give you your shot.” And he gave him a shot of tetanus antitoxin. And
he pulled out the needle, and the kid was dead. Adrenaline, it’s now atropine, but it was adrenaline in those
days. And his adrenaline didn’t do any good. The kid was dead. So that’s how fast the reaction is when you go
into anaphylactic shock.
Clip 5 - Helping Swift and Company: When I found out that they were selling their salmonella, and, in livers,
the way they were being processed. And every liver was contaminated with salmonella…So they said, “Taylor,
go up there and fi nd out why the livers are contaminated.” And I said, “I can tell you without leaving my seat,
118