Step 1: Milking The Venom

The first step is getting your hands on a lot of snakes, which are quarantined and monitored for weeks to months to ensure their good health. Before milking, put on protective gloves. Famed snake handler Bill Haast used his bare hands, but was eventually bitten on the right index finger, rendering him unable to wrangle serpents–his lifelong passion. Move the snake into a clean milking room. With some of the most deadly snakes, like banded kraits or black mambas, experts often use a short-acting anesthetic to calm the snake down.Next, grab the snake with the thumb and index finger at the very back of the head, just behind the angle of the jaw where the venom glands reside. This allows you to press on the glands while preventing the snake from turning its head and striking you. Opening a snake's jaws may require gentle pressure, and with vipers, you might have to use forceps to swivel their fangs into the upright position and pull back the sheath covering the fang's hollow tip.Take a vial and cover it with a rubber or plastic film. Then, snake in hand, push the fangs through the plastic (or let the snake simply strike on its own). Gently squeeze the glands to get out all the venom. In some cases, antivenom makers use a weak electric current to stimulate venom excretion. Carefully remove the fangs from the film. Snakes with fangs in the back of their mouths, such as colubrids, may require special tubes to bite into, which drain into a collection vial.To get enough venom, each snake must be milked many times. For example, in 1965, the National Institutes of Health asked Haast, who founded the Miami Serpentarium, to produce 1 pint of coral snake venom. It took him, a man of unrivaled skill and patience, a total of three years and 69,000 milkings to get that much, from which the first and only American coral antivenom was made. Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer) produced this same antivenom until 2003, when it closed the factory. Since then the FDA–which must approve antivenom the same way it approves other drugs–has extended the expiration date of the scant remaining supplies three times because the supply threatens to run out soon