Instituto Butantan

This guide to Instituto Butantan in São Paulo opens with curator Francisco Franco standing outside a burning building before dawn in May 2010, and follows the century of science that fire threatened: Vital Brazil's 1901 institute, built to fight the snakebite deaths killing rural workers, and the tens of thousands of preserved specimens researchers assembled generation after generation. It traces the argument at the collection's heart, that venom could be tamed by science rather than superstition, and where that argument stood the morning the fire started.