Louis Pasteur

Overview

Pasteur was a French chemist who moved into biology through the problem of why some fermentations spoil. He showed that fermentation is carried out by living microorganisms rather than by chemical decomposition, and that a broth in a flask with a curved neck stays sterile indefinitely while the same broth in an open flask does not, which removed the main experimental support for spontaneous generation. He extended the result to disease, arguing that specific microbes cause specific illnesses, and developed attenuated vaccines for anthrax and rabies on that basis. Studies on Fermentation is the accessible entry point, since it shows the reasoning from a practical industrial problem to a general biological claim.

Where to start reading

• Studies on Fermentation 1879

  The English translation of his work on the diseases of beer, setting out the case that fermentation and its spoilage are the work of specific living organisms.

  Read it in the library

Part of

• Microbiology
• Cell biology

Sources

1. Louis Pasteur Wikipedia
2. Louis Pasteur Institut Pasteur
3. Germ theory of disease Wikipedia