Haast believed he not only had an innate capacity to understand and engage with snakes, but a profound ability to grasp and improve anything. “If I really put my mind to it,” he once told Facente, “I think I could do open heart surgery.”
Haast’s third wife, Nancy, who started working at the Serpentarium as a 20-year-old assistant in 1966, recalls him spending spare moments between venom collections drawing sketches for devices to extract energy from the ocean’s waves or crack the science of perpetual motion.
When he read up on cobra bites years earlier, Haast got it in his head that their paralytic effects shared striking similarities to polio symptoms. He had a hunch the venom might hold some potential to treat the disease, although he couldn’t immediately articulate how. Eventually, he proposed that cobra toxins might block the virus from taking hold, a protective mechanism he would later liken to laying down a layer of varnish.
Many of Haast’s supporters claim he was the first person to propose using snake venom as a modern therapeutic. That’s untrue. As early as the 1910s, Western doctors concocted venom-based serums to treat epilepsy, to popular fanfare. And one of Haast’s first clients was a Baltimore drug company that had started developing a cobra venom–based pain reliver, Cobroxin, over a decade before the Serpentarium opened. Haast’s specific vision of venom’s curative potential was indeed unique. Still, it was just an idle idea, until Haast met Murray Sanders at the University of Miami.
Today, Sanders is better known for his contributions to U.S. biological weapons research during World War II and for what he claimed was an unwitting role in covering up horrific human experiments Japanese scientists conducted at their Unit 731 research facility. But in 1949 he was respected for his work on polio and investigations of the interference phenomenon, in which one viral agent competes with and inhibits another, a la Haast’s varnish theory.
Haast was wary of experts, who he feared might ridicule him as an amateur. But at Clarita’s urging he eventually told Sanders about his idea. “Well, I suppose it’s worth a try,” Sanders replied, according to Kursh. “I guess we can spare three monkeys.”
In fact, they dosed thousands of monkeys, and many more mice, with “detoxified” venom concoctions—hours after injecting them with polio. Sanders secretly tested the same serum on polio patients at the university hospital, recording the injections as “vitamins” in patients’ charts. He saw potential in early results, but experience had taught Sanders caution. While the findings merited further study, he did not immediately publish them.