The Pasteur Institute of Iran was established in 1920 through an agreement between the Institute Pasteur of Paris and the Iranian government. Its founding was made possible in part by the tradition of waqf -- Islamic charitable endowment. In 1923, Abdol-Hossein Mirza Farmanfarmaian donated the land on which the new building was constructed. Other branches in Tehran and across Iran were similarly established on donated land, from Shemiranat to Amol to Akanlu in Hamedan. In 1946, a new cooperation agreement made the Iranian institute financially and administratively independent from Paris. Dr. Marcel Baltazard, the fourth and last French director, led the institute until 1961 and continued as scientific advisor until 1966. What began as a colonial-era knowledge transfer became an institution that stood on its own.

Before the Pasteur Institute, rabies was a death sentence in Iran. Stray dogs roamed the cities and villages, and a bite meant an agonizing end. The concurrent method of injecting both serum and vaccine -- pioneered and demonstrated by the institute -- proved so effective that the WHO adopted it as a global guideline. In 1973, the institute's rabies department was designated a WHO Collaborating Center for rabies control and research. It remains one of the institute's signal achievements: a contribution so fundamental to global public health that it alone would have justified the institution's existence.

The institute's work extended far beyond rabies. Its BCG vaccine for tuberculosis was administered to 238 million children across 22 countries. When cholera epidemics struck Iran repeatedly during the institute's first fifty years, the facility became the largest cholera vaccine production platform in the region -- producing enough surplus to compensate for shortages at the Pasteur Institute of Paris itself. In 1946, plague broke out in Iran's Kurdistan Province. The institute's Department of Epidemiology dispatched expeditionary groups equipped with field laboratories. Between 1946 and 1965, these teams controlled plague outbreaks in western and northwestern Iran, rescuing many people from death. The institute also developed an anti-typhoid vaccine based on native microbes and conducted early research into polio, arboviruses, and tularemia.

The Pasteur Institute of Iran holds the distinction of being the country's first medical research center. Before World War II, when laboratories were scarce across the country, most of Iran's health problems were addressed through the institute. It founded the nation's Leprosy treatment center, helped establish the Iranian Blood Transfusion Organization, and led the effort to disinfect Tehran's drinking water in the early 1950s. Today, the institute employs 1,300 staff across 28 departments and five branches in different cities. Around 300 hold PhDs or Master's degrees. The institution produces biopharmaceuticals and diagnostic kits, publishes the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine Research, and continues to specialize in infectious diseases -- a mission that has not changed since Dr. Bahrami carried that rabies strain home from Paris over a century ago.