Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, in eastern France, the son of a tanner. He was an average student at first but became a chemist and, at twenty-five, discovered that some crystals come in mirror-image forms. As a professor in Lille he studied why wine and beer go sour, and showed that fermentation is caused by living microorganisms. He found that heating liquids gently kills the microbes that spoil them, a process now called pasteurization. With elegant experiments using swan-necked flasks, he showed that microbes do not arise spontaneously but come from other microbes. He saved France's silk industry by identifying diseases of silkworms. Building on the idea that germs cause disease, he developed vaccines against chicken cholera and anthrax. In 1885 he gave the first rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog, and the boy survived. The Pasteur Institute was founded in Paris in 1887. Pasteur suffered strokes that partly paralyzed him, and three of his daughters died young. He was a believing Catholic. He died in 1895.

Louis Pasteur is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised Catholic; accounts differ, some calling him an ardent Christian and his grandson saying he kept only a spiritual belief without religious practice. Source: Wikipedia