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From a laboratory in wartime Poland comes a fascinating story of anti-Nazi resistance and scientific ingenuity. Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed -- refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples -- causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The astonishing success of Weigl's techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the world -- giving him cover during the Nazi's violent occupation of Lviv.