Louis Pasteur
By Emily Klein

The French chemist, Louis Pasteur devoted his life to solving practical problems of industry, agriculture and medicine. His discoveries have saved countless lives and created new technologies from which the world can profit. Among his discoveries are the pasteurization process, and ways of preventing silk worm diseases, anthrax, chicken cholera and rabies. Born in 1822 in France, Pasteur received a degree of bachelor of letters from the College Royale de Besancon. For the next three years he tutored younger students and prepared for the Ecole Normale Superieure, a teacher training college in Paris. As part of his studies he investigated the crystallographic, chemical and optical properties of tartaric acid. His work laid the foundations for later study of the geometry of chemical bonds. Eventually, Pasteur's research in the optical activity of organic substances would be used as a tool for identifying molecular structure. He was quickly appointed as an assistant professor of chemistry. By 1854, Pasteur's work had gotten him appointed the dean of the school of science at the University of Lisle. It was there that a local distiller came to him in search of someone who could help him control the process of making alcohol by fermenting beet sugar. Pasteur saw that fermentation was not a simple chemical reaction, but took place only in the presence of living organisms. He discovered that fermentation, putrefaction, infection and souring are all caused by living microbes, better known as common day germs. In 1857 Pasteur published his first paper on the formation of lactic acid and its function in souring milk. With further research, he developed the technique of pasteurization which would go on to revolutionize not only the dairy industry, but food processing plants in general. In years to come, most of Pasteur's efforts went towards convincing other scientusts that germs do not originate spontaneously in substances, but enter from the outside. His work in understanding the functioning of bacteria led him to find a cure for a mysterious disease that was attacking silk worms and he discovered the concept of immunization in his work with curing anthrax. He later ventured to use the same immunization process on humans to prevent rabies that he used on cattle to prevent anthrax and was tremendously successful. Pasteur was a scientific genius whose discoveries have most likely extended all of our lives through disease prevention.

Bibliography

Dubos, Renee J., Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950.
Hallock, Grace T. and Turner, C.E., Health Heroes: Louis Pasteur. New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1925.

Young Louis Pasteur

Old Louis Pasteur