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.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Louis Pasteur
Do not let yourself be tainted with a barren skepticism.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Wine, One liners
Chance favours the prepared mind.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Intelligence
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Endurance, Courage, Bravery, Goal, Strength, Conviction, Goals, Resolve, Perseverance
Chance favors the prepared mind.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Luck, Fortune, Success, Chance
Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Ideals
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Fortune
There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Scientists, Science
Whether our efforts are, or not, favored by life, let us be able to say, when we come near to the great goal, I have done what I could.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Effort
The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Universe, The Universe
Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Wine, One liners
Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen?. Chance favors only the prepared mind.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Chance, Preparation, Observation
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Scientists, Science
Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Instincts
These three things-work, will, success-fill human existences. Will opens the door to success, both brilliant and happy. Work passes these doors, and at the end of the journey success comes in to crown one’s efforts.
—Louis Pasteur
Topics: Success
You bring me the deepest joy that can be felt by a man whose invincible belief is that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will unite, not to destroy, but to build, and that the future will belong to those who will have done most for suffering humanity.
—Louis Pasteur
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