From Wine, Silk and Cheese to Rabies: Louis Pasteur

Applications of science, not applied science.

Louis Pasteur

The 19th century is marked by many great scientific discoveries. Just look at the history of science you’ll find many discoveries that makes our understanding of the modern scientific world possible.

Among these contributors is Louis Pasteur. Not only was Pasteur a first-class researcher, but he held deep convictions that science should be used for practical purposes in order to make people’s lives better.

From art to chemistry: early life.

The son of a poor tanner, Pasteur was born in a small village in the wine country southeast of Paris in 1822. This was not the best of times in France. The turmoil that started with the French Revolution in 1789 continued with changes in government occurring on a regular basis.

In fact, in Pasteur’s lifetime he would see five changes in French government. From the Restoration, to a constitutional monarchy, to a republic then an empire, and finally back to a republic. It’s a testament to Pasteur that he was able to continue his work and make the contributions he did given all these political changes.

Pasteur’s interests, though, did not start in medicine or in microbiology, but in math and chemistry. And he was a novice artist. Though not very good, some of his artwork has survived to this day.

Pasteur studies math and chemistry in Paris, but fails the exam for his Bachelor of Science degree. Homesick and discouraged he returns to his home and studies to retake the entrance exams over again.

Under the guidance of the French chemist Antoine Ballard, Pasteur fully embraces the principles of chemistry, passes his exams for his bachelor degree and ends up working in Ballard’s lab for two years.

The foundation of a new science.

One of Pasteur’s assignments in Ballard’s lab is the way light is polarized in certain crystals.

Pasteur observed that in tartaric acid, an organic compound found in the residue at the bottom of wine barrels, light would be polarized in a certain direction. But in a synthetic solution of tartaric acid, light would be polarized in the opposite direction. His work sets the stage for a whole new field of chemistry; crystallography.

The publication of this finding becomes the springboard of Pasteur’s long and famous professional career.

In 1848 he is appointed professor of physics in Dijon and acting professor of chemistry at Strasbourg University. It’s at Strasbourg University that Pasteur meets the daughter of the rector, falls in love, and gets married. Marie Pasteur would be at his side for the rest of his life.

Wine, silk and spontaneous generation.

In 1856 Pasteur is asked by the father of one of his students for advice on the production of alcohol from beet roots. The problem wine and beer makers were having was quality control. Not every batch of beet root was ending up with alcohol.

Over the next eight years Pasteur discovers lactic acid fermentation, alcoholic fermentation, anaerobic respiration, and explains the role of oxygen in respiration. For wine and beer producers, these discoveries gives them the tools to make their products more consistent and of higher quality.

Most importantly, what came out of all this work is the process that we call pasteurization and the final disproof of spontaneous generation. If Pasteur had died at this point, in 1865, think about the impact pasteurization alone has had on our lives.

But these discoveries also led Pasteur into investigating the causes of disease.

In 1865 Pasteur was asked by the failing French silk industry to look into the disease that was affecting the silk worms that produce the silk.

Pasteur’s team tried everything they knew to keep healthy worms from becoming infected. They even destroyed all the diseased worms in the hopes that this would stop the disease. No matter what was tried, nothing seemed to stop the spread of silk worm disease.

They finally concluded that they weren’t looking for one disease, but two. After identifying the organisms that cause both diseases, Pasteur was able to teach the silk worm farmers what to look for and how to keep their silk worms healthy. The silk worm industry quickly recovered and Pasteur received national acclaim for his work.

Chickens, sheep and cattle: The Germ Theory.

It’s understandable that Pasteur would be interested in how disease happens. Three of his five children died from typhoid.

The work Pasteur did up to this point with disease gave him a better understanding of how diseases are transmitted and how they can be prevented.

Pasteur’s work on chicken cholera became the foundation for his work on anthrax and rabies. Chicken cholera isn’t dangerous to humans, but can wipe out a chicken coop in a short period of time.

Pasteur’s team knew of the work of Edward Jenner and his development of the smallpox vaccine. But they didn’t know how the vaccine worked. Pasteur’s team set out to develop a vaccine for chicken cholera based solely on trial and error.

One of Pasteur’s lab assistants accidentally allowed a culture of chicken cholera to go bad while he went on vacation. When he returned to work, rather than throwing the culture out, he inoculated some chickens with it. The chickens didn’t die from cholera, but to the lab’s surprise, neither did they come down with cholera. The chickens became immune to cholera.

By weakening the bacteria, attenuating it in scientific terms, Pasteur’s team had found a way to prevent chicken cholera. They also established the methods that would be used to develop the anthrax vaccine.

The bacteria that causes anthrax had been identified by the German scientist Robert Koch. Koch believed that it was the poisons given off by the bacteria that caused the illness. Pasteur claimed that it was the bacteria itself that did the damage.

Before he could complete his studies on anthrax, Pasteur was challenged by the editor of “The Veterinary Press”to a public test of his new anthrax vaccine. Pasteur was confident he was right, but a failure in public would severely damage his reputation.

The test was successful and Pasteur’s fame soared. The use of the vaccine on cattle and sheep was so successful that the economic gains were enough to pay the German war reparations as a result of the Franco-Prussian War.

The work that Pasteur did, along with the work of Robert Koch, established the beginning of the new science of microbiology. Together, their theories of how disease works is the basis of the Germ Theory of disease.

The crowning achievement: rabies.

With an increasing number of rabies cases showing up in hospitals, Pasteur, along with his associate Emile Roux, turns his attention to developing a vaccine for this fearful disease.

Using the same approach as he did with anthrax, Pasteur and Roux set out to create a weakened form of rabies for the vaccine. What they did not know was that rabies was caused by a virus so they never identified the organism that causes the disease.

After only 11 human trials, many of which were not successful, fate dropped a 9-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog into his lap.

Fearing his agonizing death convinced Joseph Meister’s mother to bring her son to Pasteur’s lab in July of 1885. Pasteur hesitatingly gave young Joseph the new vaccine and the boy survived.

News of this new vaccine spread rapidly and Pasteur’s lab found itself treating people from around the world.

Joseph Meister was so devoted to Pasteur that he worked at the Pasteur Institute as a caretaker. In a cruel twist of fate, when the Germans occupied France in 1940, he was executed for refusing to open the crypt of Pasteur’s tomb.

The final testament.

Pasteur died in 1895 just short of his 73rd birthday. Since 1868 he suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed. His death was the result of complications of the strokes.

There’s no question that the discoveries made by Louis Pasteur and his team, have made major impacts on our lives down to this day. He was so revered by the French people that the Pasteur Institute in Paris was totally built through contributions made by ordinary people. Today there are Pasteur Institutes around the world dedicated to the same principles of research that Pasteur followed throughout his life.

This is an example of how science is relevant to our daily lives. Is is taught this way? Of course not. Learning science should be interesting and should relate to our lives.

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John Turano