Venom in His Veins
February 06, 2026 at 11:33PMBy the time Bill Haast died at the age of 100, he’d been bitten by dozens, if not hundreds, of dangerous snakes. Mark Hay unfolds a fascinating history of Haast, the longtime proprietor of the Miami Serpentarium who hoped snake venom might prove to be a vital treatment for multiple sclerosis and polio. The details are fascinating enough to hold a reader, but Hay pushes his account well beyond mere summary and stitches together an entertaining and complex portrait of Haast. When you’re finished with this one, be sure to read Kent Russell’s “Mithradites of Fond du Lac,” about a Wisconsin man’s own Haastian efforts to cultivate a universal antivenom in his blood.
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.”
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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/06/bill-haast-snake-venom/
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