Science, discovery, and invention are usually described as the triumph of rational thinking over human feeling. Emotion, in contrast, is treated as something fragile, something that clouds judgment and weakens clarity.

But history tells a very different story.

Behind many of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs was not cold logic alone, but an emotion powerful enough to disturb someone’s peace until they searched for an answer.

Consider the fight against one of the most terrifying diseases humanity has faced: rabies. For centuries, a bite from an infected animal was almost certainly a death sentence. When the French scientist Louis Pasteur began working on a treatment, it was not merely scientific curiosity that drove him. It was also the urgency of human suffering that pushed his work forward. In 1885, when a young boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog was brought to him,........

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