Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur, (1822-95). French chemist. After completing some distinguished work on the optical activity of tartaric acid, Pasteur was appointed dean of the faculty of sciences at Lille University in 1854. Here he solved the problem of why wines and beers sour with age. By heating the wine to a temperature of 120°F he killed the yeast that caused the souring. This process, later called ‘pasteurization’, is now widely used not only for wines and beers but also for milk Pasteur then began to study infectious diseases and came to the conclusion that they were transmitted from one person to another by the germs that caused them. De-spite being partially paralysed by a stroke in 1868, he continued his work. In 1881 he made sheep immune to anthrax by inoculating them with anthrax germs that had been heated to reduce their virulence. Using similar methods, he inoculated animals against chicken cholera and rabies. His crowning achievement came in 1885, when he successfully treated a boy with rabies by means of weakened rabies germs. Pasteur’s researches into the prevention of disease by inoculation led him to discover methods of treating the diseases of silk-worms, which were of great commercial importance to the French silk industry. The Pasteur Institute, founded in 1888 to treat patients with rabies, is now a centre for biological research.
