- Who We Are
- History of Pasteurization
Born in Dole, France, Louis Pasteur married Marie Laurent with whom he had five children. Three of the children died of typhoid fever, possibly leading to Pasteur’s drive to find a cure. He graduated in 1842 from Besancon College Royal de la Franche (France?) with honors in physics, mathematics, Latin, and drawing. Later he attended the Ecole Normale to study physics and chemistry, specializing in crystals.
Louis Pasteur’s early research was helping the wine growers in France with their fermentation process. Pasteur demonstrated that fermentation is caused by the growth of microorganisms, and that the emergent growth of bacterium in nutrient broths is not due to spontaneous generation but rather to biogenesis. This idea was highly controversial for the time!
However, armed with this discovery, Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard worked together to invent a process in which liquids, such as milk, were heated to kill most bacteria and molds already present within them. The first test was successfully completed on April 20, 1862 and soon afterwards this process became known as “pasteurization”.
The contamination in beverages led Pasteur to the idea that microorganisms infecting animals and humans cause disease. He fought hard to convince doctors and surgeons that germs existed and that dirty instruments and hands could spread germs and therefore disease. It was Pasteur’s work that led Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery.
In 1865, two parasitic diseases, pebrine and flacherie, were killing large numbers of silkworms at Alais (now Ales). Pasteur worked for several years in proving that it was a microbe attacking the silkworm eggs and that by eliminating this microbe from the silkworm nurseries the diseases would be eradicated.
Many rabies cases plagued Europe in the 19th century and Louis Pasteur began to work on rabies in 1880. His initial objective was to find ways to prevent the diseases, following the route opened by his work on fowl cholera. He first succeeded in stabilizing the rabies virus by multiple transmissions from one species to another, and, starting in 1884, presented the successful results of a preventive rabies vaccination experiment on dogs. Pasteur then sought to improve his method and developed a means of attenuating the virulence and their use in the preventive vaccination of dogs proved effective. Louis Pasteur then had the idea to use this vaccination to create immunity after a bite, and to give it to a human. Pasteur took the step in 1885 and obtained his first success in humans with the vaccination of a 9-year-old child, Joseph Meister.
In the memorable meeting of 1 March 1886, Pasteur concluded: "Rabies prophylaxis after a bite is justified. There is cause to create a rabies vaccine establishment". He immediately launched an international fund. Thanks to the worldwide repercussions of his successes against rabies, donations flooded in. As a result, in 1887 an institute was created dedicated not only to rabies treatment, but to Pasteur’s study of science. The Institut Pasteur was opened in November 1888
And, while Louis Pasteur was not the first to propose germ theory, he developed it and conducted experiments to prove it. Pasteur’s experiments and discoveries led to pasteurization, to antiseptic hospitals and to the development of the first vaccines. Together with Robert Koch, Pasteur is regarded as the father of germ theory and bacteriology.