Inspirational Quotes by Louis Pasteur (French Biologist)

Louis Pasteur (1822–95) was a French chemist and bacteriologist. One of the founders of microbiology and preventative medicine, Pasteur has saved more lives than any other person in history.

Pasteur is renowned for his dazzling discoveries of inventive preventive biological procedures that include pasteurization, identification of pathogenic microorganisms, and preparation of vaccines derived from attenuated strains of pathogenic microorganisms, including chicken cholera, anthrax, and rabies.

Born in the township of Dole, France, and educated at Paris’s École Normale Supérieure, Pasteur earned four university degrees and made his first groundbreaking finding of the ‘germ theory’ of infection before he was 25. As dean of a new science program at the University of Lille, France, he created evening classes for factory workers and included industrial applications of science.

Pasteur started his own experiments on fermentation in alcohol and milk. Moving in 1867 into a laboratory of physiological chemistry set up for him by Emperor Napoleon III, he discovered that microorganisms produce fermentation and disease. Knowing fermentation was hastened by exposure to air, Pasteur proved that microbes in the air caused putrefaction. He began the procedure named after him, pasteurization, heating liquids to 50–60 degrees Celsius to kill microbes. Pasteurization of milk has saved incalculable lives from premature death caused by bacterial contamination.

Pasteur also saved France’s beer and wine industries when they were struggling with microbial contamination. Pasteur founded a private research facility, the Institut Pasteur in Paris, which specializes in treating and preventing infectious diseases.

Studies of Pasteur’s life and work include Émile Duclaux’s Pasteur: The History of a Mind (1920,) Jacques Nicolle’s Louis Pasteur: A Master of Scientific Enquiry (1961,) and René Vallery-Radot’s The Life of Pasteur (2 vol., 1902; written by Pasteur’s son-in-law, also his secretary.)

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