culture of the germ responsible for the disease and, with the collaboration of an accomplice, infecting a large quantity of butter used to feed German troops. The fact that the epidemic spread after the Germans sold some of the butter to civilians was proof that the illness's breakout was not caused by local water quality. Afterward, the German authorities ordered that the institute's stores containing microbial cultures could be opened only by authorized members; similar security problems also induced them to demand complete lists of the staff's names and functions; missing names caused the Germans to send two biologists, Dr. Wolmann and his wife, as well as other three lab assistants, to a concentration camp. The institute was not a location for German entrenchment even during the battles for Paris's liberation because of the honor and respect it commanded, as well as out of fear that involving it in any type of conflict might "free the ghosts of long defeated diseases". Economical difficulties during the 1970s At the end of 1973, the institute's economic status was so worrisome that its troubles aroused the public's interest: no one could believe that an institution that was to provide vaccines and serums for more than fifty million people could be undergoing such big financial problems, an institution that furthermore was believed to be under government protection and therefore shielded from bankruptcy. The causes of the decadence that brought the institute to financial ruin were numerous, but most of them were associated with its commercial and industrial activities and its management. This affected both the research and production branch: the research branch didn't receive enough funds and the production branch, which was losing market ground to the new private labs, was immobilized by the antiquated mechanical equipment. When in 1968, after disappearing for a long period, rabies reappeared in France, the institute, which owed its original celebrity to this disease's vaccine, was replaced by other pharmaceutical industries in the production of the vaccines; yet, despite the deficiencies in the organization's production branch, its members were able to produce, in 1968, over 400,000 doses of vaccine against the Hong Kong influenza. In 1971 Jacques Monod announced a new era of modernization and development: this was symbolized by the construction of a new factory where all the production departments were to be reunited. Its construction cost forty-five million francs and the Government granted the institute a