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Season 1 · Episode 10

Antitoxin Togo, Please

21:17Updated November 10, 2026

What do blue jeans have to do with diphtheria antitoxin and the 1925 Serum Run to Nome? Follow the journey from Levi Strauss and the Gold Rush to the 1925 serum run, where sled dogs raced to deliver life-saving antitoxin. Timeless fashion and infectious diseases might seem like an unlikely pairing, but history has a way of weaving together the unexpected.

0:0021:17
Transcript

In this episode

Jump to
  1. A Game of Timeless and Not
  2. A Pair of Pants Built to Take Abuse
  3. Gold, and the City It Built
  4. Chasing Gold to the Edge of the Map
  5. A Telegram from a Frozen Town
  6. The Great Race of Mercy
  7. The Bacterium That Needs a Virus to Be Deadly
  8. Why Diphtheria Is Not Timeless
  9. Corrections to the audio
Continuous single-line illustration in purple of a musher driving a team of sled dogs through the snow

The 1925 serum run, drawn in a single continuous line.

© Germomics

A Game of Timeless and Not#

We like to start with a game. Name the things that are timeless, and the answers come fast: red lipstick, a plain white tee, blue jeans. Name the things that are emphatically not timeless, and the list is just as quick: micro bangs, mullets, low-rise jeans, Crocs, that brief and regrettable season of wearing a dress over jeans. Somewhere on that second list, if you are us, you will also find diphtheria.

The joke has a real question folded inside it. How does a pair of blue jeans connect to a bacterial disease that once killed children by the thousands, and to a team of sled dogs running through an Alaskan winter? The path runs from cloth woven in the south of France to a tailor’s shop in Nevada, out to a frozen harbor on Norton Sound, and down to a microbe that makes diphtheria toxin only after a phage brings the tox gene.

A Pair of Pants Built to Take Abuse#

Before there was a brand, there was a fabric, and the fabric carried its birthplace in its name. A sturdy twill woven in Nîmes, in southern France, was sold as serge de Nîmes, and English speakers shortened “de Nîmes” into the word we still use: denim. The other half of the vocabulary comes from Italy. Genoa shipped a similar hard-wearing blue cloth across Europe, and the French name for the city, Gênes, is where English got “jean” and then “jeans.” The cloth and the garment were old and well traveled long before the name most of us attach to them ever showed up.

That name belonged to Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant who arrived in the United States as a poor young man and went to work in his family’s dry-goods trade in New York. In 1853, at twenty-four, he opened a West Coast branch of the family business in San Francisco and stocked it with everything a boomtown could want.

The invention that made his name famous, though, was not his. In the early 1870s a tailor named Jacob Davis, working in Reno, Nevada, took an order from a laborer’s wife who wanted work pants that could survive real punishment. Looking at the rivets he used to attach straps to horse blankets, Davis tried hammering copper rivets into the spots where trousers always blow out first, the corners of the pockets and the base of the fly. They held. The riveted pants were far tougher than anything else on the market, and orders piled up faster than one tailor could fill them. What Davis lacked was the money to file a patent, so he wrote to the man who supplied his cloth, Levi Strauss, and proposed they hold the patent together. Strauss agreed. On May 20, 1873, the two men were granted U.S. Patent No. 139,121, for an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” and the riveted blue jean was born. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the manufacturing while Strauss ran the business. More than a century later, one company is still a synonym for blue jeans, and blue jeans are still a synonym for a certain idea of America. To understand why Strauss was in San Francisco to receive that letter at all, you have to follow the gold.

Gold, and the City It Built#

Strauss did not sail west for the scenery. He came for the largest sales opportunity in the country. In January 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall spotted flakes of gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter, near Coloma in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He and Sutter tried to keep it quiet, and failed spectacularly. Word reached the East Coast, the president confirmed it before Congress, and roughly 300,000 people from across the country and around the world set out for the California goldfields. Within a few years, the little port of San Francisco became a frontier metropolis. Even in that crush it already held around 120 dry-goods stores, and Strauss had an unglamorous advantage: his family’s firm back east kept his shelves full when other merchants ran dry.

The earliest gold was almost embarrassingly easy to reach. It lay concentrated in gravel creek beds, so the first prospectors could pluck flakes and nuggets out by hand or swirl them from a pan. Over the whole rush, miners pulled more than 750,000 pounds of it from California, worth tens of billions of dollars today.

That sudden weight of people and money landed hardest on the people who were already there. On the eve of the rush, California held roughly 6,500 Californios of Spanish and Mexican descent, some 700 other foreigners, and about 150,000 Native Americans. During the rush, an estimated 120,000 of those Native Americans, roughly four in five, died from disease, starvation, and outright killing. The gold that built a state was a catastrophe for the people who had lived on that land first, and it is worth saying so plainly before we move on.

The rush also dragged California to statehood at startling speed. In 1850, only two years after Marshall’s discovery and just after the Mexican-American War handed the territory to the United States, California entered the Union as part of the Compromise of 1850, a bundle of five bills meant to hold off the fight over slavery that would later become the Civil War. One admitted California as a free state, upsetting the Senate’s balance between free and slave states; another settled the borders of Texas, which was already a slave state, roughly where they sit on the map today. A pair of work pants, it turns out, shares an origin story with the shape of a state line.

Chasing Gold to the Edge of the Map#

Gold has a way of moving people, and it kept moving them north. Nearly fifty years after California, in 1896, a strike on a tributary of the Klondike River near the Alaska-Canada border set off the last great gold rush of the century. The discovery is usually credited to a party that included the American prospector George Carmack and a Tagish man named Keish, better known as Skookum Jim; the claim was filed in Carmack’s name. Word reached Seattle and San Francisco the next summer, and something like 100,000 people set out for the Yukon, among them a young Jack London, who mined more stories than gold and turned the experience into The Call of the Wild.

The Klondike was far less forgiving than California. The two main routes in, the Chilkoot and White Pass trails, were steep enough and deadly enough that the Canadian authorities refused to let anyone cross without a year of provisions, close to a ton of goods that each stampeder hauled up the passes load by load, trip after trip. Photographs of the Chilkoot show an unbroken line of climbers strung up the slope like ants on a staircase. Of the roughly 100,000 who started, only about 30,000 reached the goldfields at all.

The Klondike faded almost as fast as it flared, partly because easier gold turned up elsewhere, including the beaches of Nome, on Alaska’s western coast, where it could be scooped from the sand without staking a claim. Nome swelled toward 20,000 people around 1900, a tent city running for miles along the waterline, and it collected at least one famous resident in Wyatt Earp, late of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, who ran a two-story saloon. (One of us, through no fault of his own, has seen the film Tombstone enough times to quote it on command; “I’ll be your huckleberry” is lodged in there permanently.) The boom collapsed the way booms do. By 1910 the census counted about 2,600 people, and Nome survives today as a town of fewer than four thousand, which is remarkable when you consider where it sits: just below the Arctic Circle, with long, dark, brutally cold winters and a harbor that freezes solid for much of the year. That frozen harbor is where the story stops being an adventure and turns into an emergency.

A Telegram from a Frozen Town#

By the winter of 1925, the ice had sealed Nome off from the sea, as it did every year from about November to July. The town had one doctor, Curtis Welch, and four nurses. After the last ship of the season left, Welch began seeing small children with sore throats and what looked like ordinary tonsillitis. Several of them died. By January he saw the thing he must have been dreading: a grayish membrane spreading across the back of a child’s throat, the classic sign of diphtheria.

His problem was almost unspeakable. The diphtheria antitoxin in his office had expired, and the fresh supply he had ordered months earlier never arrived before the port closed. It is worth being precise about what that antitoxin was, because it was not a vaccine. A vaccine trains your own immune system to defend you before you are ever exposed. Antitoxin is a treatment given after infection: antibodies raised by injecting a horse with the toxin, then harvested from the horse’s blood and given to a sick person to neutralize the poison already loose in the body. Nome needed that treatment badly and had almost none of it.

The town understood exactly what it was facing. Only six years earlier, the 1918 influenza pandemic had swept the Seward Peninsula; in the hardest-hit Native villages, somewhere between half and nine in ten residents died. With that memory fresh, Welch and the town leaders feared diphtheria could approach near-total mortality among the unprotected, and they imposed a quarantine. Then Welch sent a telegram out across the territory, in the clipped grammar of the wire, warning that an epidemic of diphtheria was almost inevitable, that he urgently needed a million units of antitoxin, and that the mail, carried by dog team, was the only transportation left.

Getting that antitoxin to Nome was the problem that became legend. There were three airplanes in all of Alaska in 1925, none built for winter, all of them dismantled for the winter, and no one willing to risk flying one that far in that cold. That left the dogs. The plan was to run the serum 674 miles across Alaska in the dead of winter by relay, picking it up where the railroad ended at Nenana and handing it from team to team toward Nome. Welch calculated the antitoxin would survive only about six days in such cold, which meant the relay had to cover, in roughly five and a half days, a route that normally took a month and had been run, once, in nine. A smaller cache of 300,000 units turned up in an Anchorage hospital, not enough to stop an epidemic but enough to treat the first patients and slow it, and it was packed into a cylinder and rushed to the railhead while more than a million more units started up the coast by ship.

The Great Race of Mercy#

Black and white photograph of Leonhard Seppala in fur arctic gear with his team of sled dogs, including Togo

Leonhard Seppala with his team, including Togo.

© Carrie McLain Museum, CC0

On January 27, 1925, the first musher set out from Nenana into temperatures between roughly fifty and sixty-two degrees below zero, blizzard whiteouts, and hurricane-force winds. Within hours of that first leg, parts of the lead driver’s face had blackened with frostbite, and at the first roadhouse he had to leave behind dogs that were already failing. Back in Nome, the case count kept climbing, and another child died.

The longest and most dangerous stretch fell to Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog, Togo. Seppala had a personal stake, a young daughter at risk in town, but he was chosen for a plainer reason: at forty-seven, with a twelve-year-old Siberian husky in the lead, he was simply the best driver in the region. He ran farther than anyone else, about 261 miles in all once you count the trip out to meet the serum and the run back, and to save time he took a route no one ran on a good afternoon, straight across the frozen surface of Norton Sound. Sea ice there flexes and cracks in the wind, and a team that lands its claws wrong can drop through into water that kills in minutes. Seppala crossed it in a gale, with Togo reading the ice in the dark and choosing the line. By one account the stretch he had just traversed broke apart and drifted out to sea only a few hours behind him.

On February 2, the final musher, Gunnar Kaasen, drove his lead dog Balto down Front Street with every glass ampule of serum intact. The relay had taken about 127 and a half hours, just over five days, run by some twenty teams and more than 150 dogs, several of which died on the trail. The antitoxin worked, and the epidemic broke. The recorded death toll was small, five to seven, but that figure reflects mostly the town’s documented cases. Welch himself guessed there were at least a hundred more cases in the Native camps outside town, and families often buried children without reporting the deaths.

History, for a while, remembered the wrong dog. Balto, who ran the last leg into town and stood for the photographers, got the statue in Central Park and, decades later, an animated movie. Togo, who ran the longest and most lethal distance, was overlooked for years before the record was set straight; he has his own statue now, and a 2019 film at last told his side. Both dogs earned their place, and the run itself, the Great Race of Mercy, lives on every year in the Iditarod sled dog race, run on some of the same trails.

The Bacterium That Needs a Virus to Be Deadly#

Light micrograph of Corynebacterium diphtheriae, rod-shaped bacteria stained purple-red on a pale pink background

Corynebacterium diphtheriae, Gram-stained, the crystal violet that gives Germomics its color.

© CDC, public domain

The agent behind all of this is a bacterium called Corynebacterium diphtheriae, first seen by Edwin Klebs in 1883 and grown in pure culture a year later by Friedrich Löffler; for that reason it is still sometimes called the Klebs-Löffler bacillus. It is a gram-positive rod, meaning it wraps itself in a thick outer wall, and it is pleomorphic, able to shift its shape with its surroundings. Several subspecies exist, any of which can cause the disease. Here is the hinge: whether a given strain can kill you depends on whether it is carrying a particular virus.

The poison that does the damage, diphtheria toxin, is not written into the bacterium’s own core genome. It is delivered by a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria, which can stitch itself into the bacterial chromosome and sit there quietly as what microbiologists call a prophage. The gene for the toxin rides along inside that viral DNA. A C. diphtheriae cell without the phage cannot cause classic diphtheria, because it makes no toxin. It can still cause milder throat and skin infections, and rarely worse. The same cell, once infected by the right phage, becomes a factory for diphtheria toxin. The bacterium causes toxin disease only once it has been infected itself.

The toxin kills by stopping protein synthesis. It slips into a human cell and disables eukaryotic elongation factor 2, which the cell needs to build every new protein. A cell that cannot make protein dies, and a single molecule of toxin is enough to shut one down. In the throat, where the bacteria usually settle, the wreckage becomes visible. Dead cells and fibrin congeal into a tough sheet, the pseudomembrane, that creeps across the back of the throat and can turn gray-green, or black where it has bled. The disease takes its very name from this membrane: diphtheria comes from the Greek for leather. Left to grow, alongside the swollen tissue and lymph nodes that give advanced cases their so-called bull neck, the membrane can close the airway outright. And if the toxin escapes into the bloodstream it travels, inflaming the heart muscle until the rhythm falters, attacking nerves until muscles give way, and injuring the kidneys. Diphtheria can suffocate you or stop your heart, and for most of human history a doctor at the bedside could do little but watch.

Why Diphtheria Is Not Timeless#

We do not hold our breath over a child’s sore throat the way families once did, and the reason is the thing the 1925 serum could never provide: a vaccine. Toxoid vaccines arrived in the 1920s, mass immunization of American children followed in the 1930s and 1940s, and protection now travels bundled with tetanus and whooping cough in the DTaP and Tdap shots calibrated to age. A disease that once arrived in deadly waves now turns up so rarely that the United States reported only 14 cases from 1996 through 2018. The horse-derived antitoxin still exists for those rare cases, though it is no longer a licensed commercial product; the Centers for Disease Control releases it as an investigational drug when a case is confirmed or strongly suspected, a direct descendant of the serum that crossed Norton Sound behind a team of dogs.

A tailor’s copper rivets, a frozen telegram, a horse’s antibodies, and a phage-borne tox gene meet in that Alaskan winter. Blue jeans are still everyday cloth. Diphtheria, thanks to vaccination and that serum run, is mostly a historical and clinical rarity in the United States. The gap between the garment that stayed and the disease that did not is the connection this episode traces.

Corrections to the audio#

The episode audio states fourteen things that are wrong. The corrections:

  • At 01:08, Levi Strauss arrives in the U.S. with his mother and brothers. He came to New York in 1847, at 18, with his mother and three sisters (PBS, They Made America).
  • At 01:16, Strauss opens his San Francisco store at 25. Born in 1829, he reached San Francisco in March 1853, at 23 or 24 (PBS, They Made America).
  • At 01:36, Davis is inspired by harnesses and fasteners. The idea came from the rivets he used to attach straps to horse blankets (U.S. National Archives).
  • At 03:12, we call the 120,000 Native Californians who died about 90% of the 150,000. It was about 80%: roughly 120,000 of 150,000 died of disease, starvation and homicide during the gold rush (PBS American Experience).
  • At 04:59, California is made a free state as a balance to Texas. Admitting California as a free state threatened the balance between free and slave states in the Senate; it did not offset Texas (Library of Congress).
  • At 05:09, the Klondike strike is placed forty years after the California Gold Rush. It came in 1896, 48 years after the 1848 discovery at Sutter’s sawmill (HISTORY, Klondike Gold Rush).
  • At 09:33, the horse antibodies neutralize the pathogen. Antitoxin neutralizes the circulating toxin, not the bacterium (Marshall et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases (2025)).
  • At 12:42, the first musher’s face turns black from hypothermia. The blackening was frostbite (National Endowment for the Humanities).
  • At 13:01, January 31 is called New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve is December 31; Seppala began his leg on January 31 (National Endowment for the Humanities).
  • At 14:52, Native deaths are estimated at over 100. Welch estimated at least a hundred cases among Native people outside town; how many died is unknown (National Endowment for the Humanities).
  • At 15:24, Klebs and Löffler discover the bacterium in 1884. Edwin Klebs described it in 1883, and Friedrich Löffler cultivated it in 1884 (Grandière Pérez and Brisse, Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (2025)).
  • At 17:56, the pseudomembrane turns black from necrosis. It turns black where bleeding has occurred (CDC Pinkbook).
  • At 19:19, the FDA distributes the antitoxin. It is available only from CDC, through an Investigational New Drug protocol (CDC Pinkbook).
  • At 20:08, we call this episode 11. It is episode 10 (Germomics podcast feed).

Hosts

Sources and Credits
  1. CreditWritten and performed by Dr. Dustin Edwards and Dr. Faith Cox (another site)
  2. MusicIn Your Arms by Kevin MacLeod (another site)CC BY 4.0
  3. ImageCover illustration of the 1925 serum runGermomics
  4. ImageCorynebacterium diphtheriae Gram stainCDCPublic domain
  5. ImageLeonhard Seppala with TogoCarrie McLain MuseumCC0
  6. referenceThe History of Denim (another site)Levi Strauss & Co.Strauss arrived in San Francisco 1853 at age 24; Davis-Strauss patent No. 139,121, May 20, 1873.
  7. referenceForever in Blue Jeans and in Court (another site)U.S. National Archives (Pieces of History)Patent 139,121, improvement in fastening pocket openings, May 20, 1873.
  8. referenceThe history of jeans: from the origin of denim to indigo (another site)Candiani Denimserge de Nimes to denim; bleu de Genes (blue of Genoa) to blue jeans.
  9. referenceThe California Gold Rush (another site)PBS American Experience6,500 Californios, 700 foreigners, 150,000 Native Americans; 120,000 Native Americans died of disease, starvation, homicide.
  10. referenceLevi Strauss (another site)PBS, They Made AmericaCame to New York in steerage in 1847; brothers supplied his San Francisco store; 117 dry-goods stores, many lacking merchandise; Davis could not afford a patent application and moved to San Francisco as head tailor and production foreman.
  11. referenceThe Truth — and Exaggerations — of LS&Co. (another site)Levi Strauss & Co.Strauss learned his trade from his half-brothers' New York dry goods wholesale business.
  12. referenceGold Rush: California, Date and Sutters Mill (another site)HISTORYMarshall at Sutters Mill, Jan 1848; more than 750,000 pounds of gold extracted.
  13. referenceMarshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park (another site)California State ParksMarshall found flecks of gold in the tailrace of the sawmill he was building, 1848.
  14. referenceCensus of 1852: Historic Context (another site)California Secretary of StateApproximately 300,000 people immigrated to the region in search of gold.
  15. referenceCompromise of 1850: Primary Documents in American History (another site)Library of CongressFive laws; California entered as a free state, upsetting the Senate balance; Texas-New Mexico boundary settled.
  16. referenceCalifornia Gold Rush (another site)Encyclopaedia BritannicaAbout 300,000 migrants; statehood hastened in 1850.
  17. referenceKlondike Gold Rush (another site)HISTORY1896 discovery (Carmack, Jim Mason and Tagish Charlie); ~100,000 set out, ~30,000 reached Dawson; one-ton supply rule; Chilkoot/White Pass.
  18. referenceKeish (Skookum Jim) (another site)U.S. National Park ServiceKeish, called Skookum Jim, and George Carmack's family group found gold on Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek in August 1896.
  19. referenceKeish (Skookum Jim Mason) (another site)Dictionary of Canadian BiographyTagish; Carmack staked the discovery claim on 24 Sept. 1896 while Jim and Charlie staked on either side.
  20. referenceThe Last Great Gold Rush (another site)HISTORYJack London went in 1897, returned broke and drew on the experience to write The Call of the Wild.
  21. referenceThe Stampede North: The Alaska Gold Rushes, 1897-1904 (another site)U.S. National Park ServiceNome from ~250 to over 20,000 by 1900; fell to 2,600 by 1910.
  22. referenceNome, Alaska (another site)WikipediaWyatt Earps Dexter Saloon (1899); 1900 census 12,488, 1910 census 2,600; 2020 population 3,699; on the Seward Peninsula.
  23. reference1925 serum run to Nome (another site)Wikipedia20 mushers, ~150 dogs, 674 miles, 127.5 hours; Togos team 261 mi (longest/most dangerous), Baltos team 55 mi; Anchorage 300,000 units; Norton Sound shortcut; Nome about two degrees south of the Arctic Circle; Welchs telegram.
  24. referenceThe Sled Dog Relay That Inspired the Iditarod (another site)HISTORYWelch feared an epidemic and ordered a quarantine; Gov. Scott C. Bone organized; -60F; Wild Bill Shannon frostbite; Norton Sound crossed hours before the ice broke; the Iditarod runs on some of the same trails.
  25. reference100 Years After the Great Serum Run, Baltos Legacy Endures (another site)Cleveland Museum of Natural HistoryNorton Sound crossed ~3 hours before it broke; arrival in Nome Feb 2, 1925; ~5.5 days.
  26. referenceThis Heroic Dog Raced Across the Frozen Alaskan Wilderness to Deliver Life-Saving Medicine (another site)Smithsonian MagazineSeppala's 8-year-old daughter, Sigrid, was at risk; Togo is commemorated by statues in Cleveland, New York City and Maine.
  27. referenceDog vs. Airplane (another site)National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities magazineShannon's face was black with frostbite; Seppala and Togo began the longest leg on January 31; Welch imagined at least a hundred cases among the Natives, with no telling how many deaths.
  28. referenceThe 1919–21 influenza pandemic in Greenland (Ingholt et al., 2024) (another site)International Journal of Circumpolar Health (PMC)Cites earlier work (Mamelund 2011): half the Indigenous villages on the Seward Peninsula had 1918 flu mortality of 47-90%, vs 0.47% for non-Indigenous populations.
  29. referenceCorynebacterium diphtheriae (another site)WikipediaKlebs-Loffler bacillus, 1884; gram-positive; tox gene carried by a lysogenic corynephage (prophage); toxin inactivates EF-2; adherent, dense, grey pseudomembrane.
  30. referenceOne molecule of diphtheria toxin fragment A introduced into a cell can kill the cell (another site)Cell (Yamaizumi et al., 1978)A single molecule of the toxin's active fragment A kills a cell.
  31. referenceDiphtheria (another site)Merck Manual Professional VersionTough, fibrinous, adherent membrane; local edema gives the bull neck; toxin damages the heart, nerves and sometimes the kidneys.
  32. referenceCorynebacterium Diphtheriae (Medical Microbiology, 4th ed.) (another site)NCBI BookshelfKlebs 1883 / Loffler 1884; toxin damages internal organs via a soluble toxin; antitoxin neutralizes circulating toxin.
  33. referencePinkbook: Diphtheria (another site)CDCHorse-derived antitoxin used since the 1890s, available only from CDC under an Investigational New Drug protocol; neutralizes circulating but not tissue-fixed toxin; DTaP/Tdap/Td vaccines; 14 US cases from 1996 through 2018, one fatal; membrane greyish-green, or black if bleeding has occurred.
  34. referenceGermomics podcast feed (another site)GermomicsLists Antitoxin Togo, Please as season 1, episode 10.
  35. referenceDiphtheria Antitoxin Production and Procurement Practices and Challenges (another site)Emerging Infectious Diseases 31(12), 2025 (Marshall et al.)Treatment of respiratory diphtheria requires prompt equine diphtheria antitoxin to neutralize circulating toxin.
  36. referenceDiphtheria antitoxin treatment: from pioneer to neglected (another site)Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 2025 (Grandière Pérez and Brisse)Corynebacterium diphtheriae was discovered and cultivated by Edwin Klebs (1883) and Friedrich Loeffler (1884).
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