Louis Pasteur—The life of a controversial scientist with a prepared mind, driven by curiosity, motivation, and competition

Abstract

Louis Pasteur, born December 27, 1822 in Dole, France, showed in his childhood and youth great abilities as an artistic painter; however by an age of 19, his interest changed toward science, and he moved to Paris to study chemistry and physics at École Normale Supérieure. During graduation, he initiated research on chiral crystallography and stereochemistry and got his doctorates in 1847 in both chemistry and physics. In 1848, he started as high school teacher in Dijon, but shortly after he became a deputy professor at the University of Strasbourg in chemistry and got married to the rector's daughter Marie Laurent. They had five children, of which only two survived. The family moved to Lille in 1854, where he worked as professor in chemistry and became the dean at the new Faculty of Science at the University of Lille. He initiated his famous research on fermentation in 1855. Louis Pasteur moved back to École Normale Supérieure in 1857, where a major part of his innovative research on fermentation took place ending up with the development of pasteurization in 1864. Through genius experiments, he disputed the spontaneous genesis theory and founded the basis for the germ theory, later confirmed by his enemy Robert Koch and several other research teams, which he for lifetime competed with on the cure and prevention against infectious disease causes by both bacteria such as cholera, anthrax, and virus‐induced infections as yellow fever and rabies. However, most of his experiments were done on animals since Pasteur and his colleagues at École Normale Superiére were not physicians but scientists. The first successful attenuated vaccine used in humans against rabies was, when the 9‐year‐old Joseph Meister was cured or prevented from rabies in 1885 after 13 vaccine injections done by the young pediatrician Joseph Grancher. This worldwide known intervention is both world famous and ethically criticized and disputed. The Pasteur Institute was inaugurated in 1888—now an international prestigious research institute—which has been expanded since in a network of affiliated Pasteur institutes over the whole world. There were multiple links to Danish scientists of the 19th century and to the Danish brewery industry. Most well known is the strong friendship between Louis Pasteur and the Carlsberg brewery and especially to its founder Jacob Christian Jacobsen, who was a great believer on a scientific approach to a cleaner fermentation process and better beer quality. Louis Pasteur stands as a milestone example of the fruitful outcome of scientific competition and collaboration and should therefore be remembered as an inspiration for present and future scientists.