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to health. Not one fatality had occurred. This was probably due in part to the fact that only healthy, young volunteers were accepted, but it was also thanks to Dr. Roger Post Ames, the camp’s yellow fever specialist who had, by far, the highest success rate in nursing victims of yellow jack back to health. His success may have been in his psychological approach to patients. He and his male nurse, Lambert, were known to talk away the fear and panic that often came with the fever. He instilled confidence in the men and once told a group of soldiers that, “No doctor should ask a man to submit to a disease unless he knows he can cure him.” Ames was from New Orleans and had survived the 1878 epidemic as a child; he believed that the mild childhood case had given him immunity. He was wrong.

With a resounding “yes” from the surgeon general to continue to the final phase of experiments using blood, the board planned to use four volunteers who would receive gradually decreasing doses of infected blood. The blood also had to be “ripe,” having been drawn from a patient in the first few days of fever. The word ripe seems ironic given that it usually implies harvesting something that has grown sweet, full and fleshy. Blood, the scientists would find, was indeed ripe; but the fruit of their harvest would instead be disease.

The first volunteer received the full dose—2cc—of ripe blood from one of Reed’s yellow fever subjects. Within four days he was stricken with a nonfatal case of yellow fever. Then, 1.5cc of blood was drawn from his veins and injected into the second volunteer. In two and a half days, the second volunteer came down with a “pretty infection,” according to Reed. The blood flowed from one volunteer to the next, the yellow fever virus floating in it like leaves swept in a current.

After that, the board’s experiments stalled while they waited for additional volunteers. At last, two more came forward. A private from the Hospital Corps was injected with 0.5cc of ripe blood taken from a recently fatal case of yellow jack and fell feverish two days later. Four control subjects, Kissinger, Moran and two Spaniards, all of whom had suffered previous cases of yellow fever during the experiments, were injected with ripe blood. None of the control subjects contracted the fever, proving that their previous cases had provided immunity. All that was needed now was the fourth and final blood experiment, and Reed could return to his lab in the States to dissect mosquitoes and begin hunting for the agent causing yellow fever.

On the morning of January 24, 1901, John H. Andrus reported to work in the board’s lab as usual. He was a twenty-two-year-old member of the Hospital Corps who had been assigned in October to work with Reed, Carroll and their assistant, Neate, in the lab. Andrus’s job, like Jesse Lazear’s had once been, was the raising and caring for the lab’s mosquitoes—their “pets.” Andrus captured the mosquitoes from stagnant water in epidemic-ridden areas and raised them in the jars of the lab, even allowing the females to bite him when blood was needed for the next generation of eggs.

Andrus was busy with his pet mosquitoes that morning when Reed and Carroll entered the lab in mid-argument. Neither seemed to acknowledge Andrus as they bickered about the blood of one of their volunteers. The blood was ripe, and the window of time for injecting it into a new volunteer was narrowing, but the board had just learned that their fourth volunteer had backed out. Reed was frustrated and impatient. He had already waited two weeks for the final volunteers to come forward, and he was anxious to finish the study. Reed decided he would be the fourth volunteer.

Carroll pleaded with him not to—as a test subject, Reed could not have been a poorer choice. He was thirty years older than most of the volunteers and was continuing to suffer from some kind of stomach distress. Inoculating himself would essentially be suicide. Carroll himself, still struggling to recover from his bout of yellow fever months before, had barely survived. Lazear