Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him.
100 Facts About Louis Pasteur
2.
Louis Pasteur is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has been honored as the "father of bacteriology" and the "father of microbiology".
3.
Louis Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation.
4.
Louis Pasteur is regarded as one of the fathers of germ theory of diseases, which was a minor medical concept at the time.
5.
Louis Pasteur is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization.
6.
Louis Pasteur made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals and racemization.
7.
Louis Pasteur's work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.
8.
Louis Pasteur was the director of the Pasteur Institute, established in 1887, until his death, and his body was interred in a vault beneath the institute.
9.
Louis Pasteur was born on 27 December 1822, in Dole, Jura, France, to a Catholic family of a poor tanner.
10.
Louis Pasteur was the third child of Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui.
11.
Louis Pasteur was an average student in his early years, and not particularly academic, as his interests were fishing and sketching.
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Louis Pasteur drew many pastels and portraits of his parents, friends and neighbors.
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Louis Pasteur was appointed a tutor at the Besancon college while continuing a degree science course with special mathematics.
14.
Louis Pasteur managed to pass the baccalaureat scientifique degree from Dijon, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics degree in 1842, but with a mediocre grade in chemistry.
15.
Later in 1842, Louis Pasteur took the entrance test for the Ecole Normale Superieure.
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Louis Pasteur passed the first set of tests, but because his ranking was low, Pasteur decided not to continue and try again next year.
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Louis Pasteur went back to the Parisian boarding school to prepare for the test.
18.
Louis Pasteur attended classes at the Lycee Saint-Louis and lectures of Jean-Baptiste Dumas at the Sorbonne.
19.
Louis Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1848, and became the chair of chemistry in 1852.
20.
Louis Pasteur resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid in 1848.
21.
Louis Pasteur determined that optical activity related to the shape of the crystals, and that an asymmetric internal arrangement of the molecules of the compound was responsible for twisting the light.
22.
Louis Pasteur was motivated to investigate fermentation while working at Lille.
23.
Louis Pasteur began his research in the topic by repeating and confirming works of Theodor Schwann, who demonstrated a decade earlier that yeast were alive.
24.
Louis Pasteur demonstrated that this theory was incorrect, and that yeast was responsible for fermentation to produce alcohol from sugar.
25.
Louis Pasteur demonstrated that, when a different microorganism contaminated the wine, lactic acid was produced, making the wine sour.
26.
In 1861, Louis Pasteur observed that less sugar fermented per part of yeast when the yeast was exposed to air.
27.
Louis Pasteur's research showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk.
28.
Louis Pasteur patented the process, to fight the "diseases" of wine, in 1865.
29.
Louis Pasteur proposed preventing the entry of micro-organisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.
30.
In 1866, Louis Pasteur published Etudes sur le Vin, about the diseases of wine, and he published Etudes sur la Biere in 1876, concerning the diseases of beer.
31.
In 1865, Louis Pasteur went to Ales and worked for five years until 1870.
32.
Louis Pasteur developed a system to prevent pebrine: after the female moths laid their eggs, the moths were turned into a pulp.
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Louis Pasteur received a particularly stern criticism from Felix Archimede Pouchet, who was director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History.
34.
Louis Pasteur placed boiled liquid in a flask and let hot air enter the flask.
35.
Louis Pasteur gave a series of five presentations of his findings before the French Academy of Sciences in 1881, which were published in 1882 as Memoire Sur les corpuscules organises qui existent dans l'atmosphere: Examen de la doctrine des generations spontanees.
36.
Louis Pasteur accepted and made five long stays in Ales, between 7 June 1865 and 1869.
37.
Contrary, for example, to Quatrefages, who coined the new word pebrine, Louis Pasteur made the mistake of believing that the two diseases were the same and even that most of the diseases of silkworms known up to that time were identical with each other and with pebrine.
38.
Louis Pasteur made another mistake: he began by denying the "parasitic" nature of pebrine, which several scholars considered well established.
39.
At a time where Louis Pasteur had not yet understood the cause of the pebrine, he propagated an effective process to stop infections: a sample of chrysalises was chosen, they were crushed and the corpuscles were searched for in the crushed material; if the proportion of corpuscular pupae in the sample was very low, the chamber was considered good for reproduction.
40.
In 1878, at the Congres international sericicole, Louis Pasteur admitted that "if pebrine is overcome, flacherie still exerts its ravages".
41.
Louis Pasteur attributed the persistence of flacherie to the fact that the farmers had not followed his advice.
42.
Louis Pasteur received the bacteria samples from Henry Toussaint.
43.
Louis Pasteur started the study in 1877, and by the next year, was able to maintain a stable culture using broths.
44.
In 1879, Louis Pasteur, planning for holiday, instructed his assistant, Charles Chamberland to inoculate the chickens with fresh bacteria culture.
45.
Louis Pasteur injected the freshly recovered chickens with fresh bacteria that normally would kill other chickens; the chickens no longer showed any sign of infection.
46.
In December 1880, Louis Pasteur presented his results to the French Academy of Sciences as "Sur les maladies virulentes et en particulier sur la maladie appelee vulgairement cholera des poules " and published it in the academy's journal.
47.
Louis Pasteur attributed that the bacteria were weakened by contact with oxygen.
48.
Louis Pasteur explained that bacteria kept in sealed containers never lost their virulence, and only those exposed to air in culture media could be used as vaccine.
49.
Louis Pasteur introduced the term "attenuation" for this weakening of virulence as he presented before the academy, saying:.
50.
Louis Pasteur's vaccine against chicken cholera was not regular in its effects and was a failure.
51.
Louis Pasteur cultivated bacteria from the blood of animals infected with anthrax.
52.
Louis Pasteur was told that sheep that died from anthrax were buried in the field.
53.
Louis Pasteur thought that earthworms might have brought the bacteria to the surface.
54.
Louis Pasteur found anthrax bacteria in earthworms' excrement, showing that he was correct.
55.
Louis Pasteur told the farmers not to bury dead animals in the fields.
56.
Louis Pasteur had been trying to develop the anthrax vaccine since 1877, soon after Robert Koch's discovery of the bacterium.
57.
Louis Pasteur tested on eight dogs and 11 sheep, half of which died after inoculation.
58.
Louis Pasteur thought that this type of killed vaccine should not work because he believed that attenuated bacteria used up nutrients that the bacteria needed to grow.
59.
Louis Pasteur did not directly disclose how he prepared the vaccines used at Pouilly-le-Fort.
60.
In 1882, Louis Pasteur replied to Koch in a speech, to which Koch responded aggressively.
61.
Koch stated that Louis Pasteur tested his vaccine on unsuitable animals and that Louis Pasteur's research was not properly scientific.
62.
In 1883, Louis Pasteur wrote that he used cultures prepared in a similar way to his successful fermentation experiments and that Koch misinterpreted statistics and ignored Louis Pasteur's work on silkworms.
63.
Louis Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits, and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue.
64.
The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a colleague of Louis Pasteur, who had produced a killed vaccine using this method.
65.
Louis Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued.
66.
Analysis of his laboratory notebooks shows that Louis Pasteur had treated two people before his vaccination of Meister.
67.
Louis Pasteur began treatment of Jean-Baptiste Jupille on 20 October 1885, and the treatment was successful.
68.
The first of the Louis Pasteur Institutes was built on the basis of this achievement.
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Louis Pasteur's family obeyed, and all his documents were held and inherited in secrecy.
70.
Louis Pasteur changed his conclusion in 1858, stating that fermentation was directly related to the growth of moulds, which required air for growth.
71.
Louis Pasteur regarded himself as the first to show the role of microorganisms in fermentation.
72.
Louis Pasteur started his experiments in 1857 and published his findings in 1858.
73.
Bechamp noted that Louis Pasteur did not bring any novel idea or experiments.
74.
Louis Pasteur believed that fermentation was only due to living cells.
75.
Louis Pasteur publicly claimed his success in developing the anthrax vaccine in 1881.
76.
Toussaint isolated the bacteria that caused chicken cholera in 1879 and gave samples to Louis Pasteur who used them for his own works.
77.
Louis Pasteur then gave a misleading account of the preparation of the anthrax vaccine used in the experiment.
78.
Louis Pasteur claimed that he made a "live vaccine", but used potassium dichromate to inactivate anthrax spores, a method similar to Toussaint's.
79.
Louis Pasteur's experiments are often cited as against medical ethics, especially on his vaccination of Meister.
80.
Louis Pasteur did not have any experience in medical practice, and more importantly, lacked a medical license.
81.
However, Louis Pasteur executed vaccination of the boy under the close watch of practising physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher, head of the Paris Children's Hospital's paediatric clinic, and Alfred Vulpian, a member of the Commission on Rabies.
82.
Louis Pasteur was not allowed to hold the syringe, although the inoculations were entirely under his supervision.
83.
Louis Pasteur has been criticized for keeping secrecy of his procedure and not giving proper pre-clinical trials on animals.
84.
Louis Pasteur stated that he kept his procedure secret in order to control its quality.
85.
Louis Pasteur later disclosed his procedures to a small group of scientists.
86.
Louis Pasteur wrote that he had successfully vaccinated 50 rabid dogs before using it on Meister.
87.
Louis Pasteur was awarded 1,500 francs in 1853 by the Pharmaceutical Society for the synthesis of racemic acid.
88.
Louis Pasteur was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1869.
89.
Louis Pasteur was elected to permanent secretary of the physical science section of the academy in 1887 and held the position until 1889.
90.
In 1873, Louis Pasteur was elected to the Academie Nationale de Medecine and was made the commander in the Brazilian Order of the Rose.
91.
Louis Pasteur received the Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1882.
92.
Louis Pasteur won the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to microbiology in 1895.
93.
Louis Pasteur was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1853, promoted to Officer in 1863, to Commander in 1868, to Grand Officer in 1878 and made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1881.
94.
In 1887, fundraising for the Louis Pasteur Institute began, with donations from many countries.
95.
Since 1891 the Louis Pasteur Institute had been extended to different countries, and currently there are 32 institutes in 29 countries in various parts of the world.
96.
Louis Pasteur was the daughter of the rector of the University of Strasbourg, and was Pasteur's scientific assistant.
97.
Louis Pasteur died from typhoid fever, aged 9, whilst at the boarding school Arbois in 1859.
98.
However, Catholic observers often said that Louis Pasteur remained an ardent Christian throughout his whole life, and his son-in-law wrote, in a biography of him:.
99.
In 1868, Louis Pasteur suffered a severe brain stroke that paralysed the left side of his body, but he recovered.
100.
Louis Pasteur was given a state funeral and was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but his remains were reinterred in the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in a vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.