Posted on Jul 6, 2020
Louis Pasteur’s risky move to save a boy from almost certain death
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On July 6, 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully gave an anti-rabies vaccine to 9-year-old Joseph Meister thus saving his life. From the article:
"Louis Pasteur’s risky move to save a boy from almost certain death
Health Jul 7, 2016 1:26 PM EDT
Early in the morning of July 4, 1885, a “mad dog” attacked a 9-year-old boy from Alsace, France. His name was Joseph Meister. The vicious and crazed dog proceeded to throw the boy to the ground and bite him in 14 places, including the hand, legs and thighs. Some of the wounds were so deep that he could hardly walk. Twelve hours later, at 8:00 in the evening, a local doctor named Weber treated Joseph’s most serious wounds by cauterizing, or sealing them, with searing doses of carbolic acid, in and of itself a horribly painful process.
Beyond the bites themselves, the boy’s mother feared her child had contracted rabies, which was widely feared as a near certain path to death. Despite the relative rarity of rabies in 19th century France, the shocking symptoms and grisly power to kill captured that nation’s attention, just as many newly emerging contagious events — such as SARS, Ebola and Zika — have done in the United States today.
Mrs. Meister took Joseph straight to Paris because she heard that a scientist there was working on a cure for rabies. Once there, she made inquiries on how to find this man and was told to go directly to the laboratory of the now famous microbiologist, Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur was, indeed, hard at work developing a rabies vaccine, using dogs as his experimental subjects. Up until now, however, he had not administered the vaccine to a human being. In reality, he could not do so legally because he was not a medical doctor; his doctorate was awarded for dissertations in chemistry and physics. More importantly, he could not yet prove that his rabies vaccine was effective — as opposed to useless or even harmful — for humans.
Pasteur was so taken by the boy’s plight that he consulted two physicians, Alfred Vulpain and Jacques Grancher at a weekly meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. They, too, were struck by the need to do something, and to do it fast. Pasteur later reported, “Since the death of the child appeared inevitable, I resolved, though not without great anxiety, to try the method which had proved consistently successful on the dogs.”
Pasteur escaped the medical license dilemma by having his medical colleagues present when the vaccine was first administered on July 6, 1885, some 60 hours after the initial dog attack. Mrs. Meister expressed little concern over the potential dangers of the experimental vaccine because she was so fearful that her son would die and she readily gave Pasteur her consent.
The first injection was made in a fold of skin covering the boy’s right upper abdomen. Over a period of three weeks, Joseph was given 13 such inoculations. Pasteur monitored the virulence of each dose by first injecting them in healthy rabbits to insure the vaccine did not cause rabies. Each dose came from progressively more rabid rabbits. At the end of the treatment course, Joseph was inoculated with an especially virulent rabies virus from a mad dog. Nothing happened! Pasteur was pleased to announce, thanks to his vaccine, Meister had developed an immunity to rabies virus.
The rest of Louis Pasteur’s remarkable career as a world-changing scientist has been well documented in a shelf of books and articles about him.
But whatever happened to Joseph Meister?
He fully recovered from the dog attack, for starters. Louis Pasteur later hired him to work as a concierge at the Institut Pasteur, his deluxe laboratory where some of the most important discoveries elucidating infectious diseases were made. There Meister happily worked for several decades until the second World War broke out.
On June 24, 1940, 10 days after the German army conquered Paris, a 64-year-old Meister took his own life. For many years, the popular legend of Meister’s death was that he committed suicide rather than allow (or watch) the Nazi invaders to pillage Pasteur’s crypt.
Recently, however, this story had been debunked, or at least augmented with more accurate facts, thanks to two intrepid researchers named Héloïse Dufour and Sean Carroll.
Using the diary of Eugene Wollman, the head of the institute’s bacteriophage laboratory at this time, other archival sources, and interviews with Meister’s granddaughter, Dufour and Carroll discovered that Meister killed himself by turning on a gas stove, rather than a self-inflicted gun shot as has often been reported. In fact, he did not take his life out of an obligation to protect Pasteur’s remains. Instead, he was despondent over his wife and children. They had fled Paris a few weeks earlier to escape the Nazi bombing, and Meister somehow got it into his head that the Germans had killed them.
Here’s the most striking irony of this tragedy: His very much alive wife and daughters returned to Paris later that very day only to find Joseph dead.
The story of Meister standing guard over the coffin of the man who saved his life is just a myth, but a heroic myth, nevertheless.
What has never been in doubt, however, is the fact that on July 6, 1885, Joseph Meister made medical history."
"Louis Pasteur’s risky move to save a boy from almost certain death
Health Jul 7, 2016 1:26 PM EDT
Early in the morning of July 4, 1885, a “mad dog” attacked a 9-year-old boy from Alsace, France. His name was Joseph Meister. The vicious and crazed dog proceeded to throw the boy to the ground and bite him in 14 places, including the hand, legs and thighs. Some of the wounds were so deep that he could hardly walk. Twelve hours later, at 8:00 in the evening, a local doctor named Weber treated Joseph’s most serious wounds by cauterizing, or sealing them, with searing doses of carbolic acid, in and of itself a horribly painful process.
Beyond the bites themselves, the boy’s mother feared her child had contracted rabies, which was widely feared as a near certain path to death. Despite the relative rarity of rabies in 19th century France, the shocking symptoms and grisly power to kill captured that nation’s attention, just as many newly emerging contagious events — such as SARS, Ebola and Zika — have done in the United States today.
Mrs. Meister took Joseph straight to Paris because she heard that a scientist there was working on a cure for rabies. Once there, she made inquiries on how to find this man and was told to go directly to the laboratory of the now famous microbiologist, Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur was, indeed, hard at work developing a rabies vaccine, using dogs as his experimental subjects. Up until now, however, he had not administered the vaccine to a human being. In reality, he could not do so legally because he was not a medical doctor; his doctorate was awarded for dissertations in chemistry and physics. More importantly, he could not yet prove that his rabies vaccine was effective — as opposed to useless or even harmful — for humans.
Pasteur was so taken by the boy’s plight that he consulted two physicians, Alfred Vulpain and Jacques Grancher at a weekly meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. They, too, were struck by the need to do something, and to do it fast. Pasteur later reported, “Since the death of the child appeared inevitable, I resolved, though not without great anxiety, to try the method which had proved consistently successful on the dogs.”
Pasteur escaped the medical license dilemma by having his medical colleagues present when the vaccine was first administered on July 6, 1885, some 60 hours after the initial dog attack. Mrs. Meister expressed little concern over the potential dangers of the experimental vaccine because she was so fearful that her son would die and she readily gave Pasteur her consent.
The first injection was made in a fold of skin covering the boy’s right upper abdomen. Over a period of three weeks, Joseph was given 13 such inoculations. Pasteur monitored the virulence of each dose by first injecting them in healthy rabbits to insure the vaccine did not cause rabies. Each dose came from progressively more rabid rabbits. At the end of the treatment course, Joseph was inoculated with an especially virulent rabies virus from a mad dog. Nothing happened! Pasteur was pleased to announce, thanks to his vaccine, Meister had developed an immunity to rabies virus.
The rest of Louis Pasteur’s remarkable career as a world-changing scientist has been well documented in a shelf of books and articles about him.
But whatever happened to Joseph Meister?
He fully recovered from the dog attack, for starters. Louis Pasteur later hired him to work as a concierge at the Institut Pasteur, his deluxe laboratory where some of the most important discoveries elucidating infectious diseases were made. There Meister happily worked for several decades until the second World War broke out.
On June 24, 1940, 10 days after the German army conquered Paris, a 64-year-old Meister took his own life. For many years, the popular legend of Meister’s death was that he committed suicide rather than allow (or watch) the Nazi invaders to pillage Pasteur’s crypt.
Recently, however, this story had been debunked, or at least augmented with more accurate facts, thanks to two intrepid researchers named Héloïse Dufour and Sean Carroll.
Using the diary of Eugene Wollman, the head of the institute’s bacteriophage laboratory at this time, other archival sources, and interviews with Meister’s granddaughter, Dufour and Carroll discovered that Meister killed himself by turning on a gas stove, rather than a self-inflicted gun shot as has often been reported. In fact, he did not take his life out of an obligation to protect Pasteur’s remains. Instead, he was despondent over his wife and children. They had fled Paris a few weeks earlier to escape the Nazi bombing, and Meister somehow got it into his head that the Germans had killed them.
Here’s the most striking irony of this tragedy: His very much alive wife and daughters returned to Paris later that very day only to find Joseph dead.
The story of Meister standing guard over the coffin of the man who saved his life is just a myth, but a heroic myth, nevertheless.
What has never been in doubt, however, is the fact that on July 6, 1885, Joseph Meister made medical history."
Louis Pasteur’s risky move to save a boy from almost certain death
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Louis Pasteur Documentary The Father of Germ Theory
biography of famous people
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on July 6, 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully gave an anti-rabies vaccine to 9-year-old Joseph Meister thus saving his life.
Louis Pasteur Documentary The Father of Germ Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR_2Zyc--SQ
Image
1. Louis Pasteur with 9-year-old boy Joseph Meister who was the first human to receive Pasteur's rabies vaccination.
2. 1886 print of Louis Pasteur pursuing a rabies vaccine in this etching by young Finnish artist, Léopold Flameng.
Louis Pasteur holds a drying bottle, contemplating a piece of nerve tissue from a rabid rabbit. He’s using the bottle to attenuate the deadly hydrophobia virus, the key to his lifesaving rabies shots. In this brilliant portrait there is no sign of friendship, but it was fundamental to the painting’s creation.
3. Joseph Meister, who received inoculation of the rabies vaccine from Pasteur in July 1885
4. Louis Pasteur 'When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.'
Biographies
1. sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/louis-pasteur
2. lemelson.mit.edu/resources/louis-pasteur
1. Background from {[https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/louis-pasteur]}
Louis Pasteur
During the mid- to late 19th century Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms cause disease and discovered how to make vaccines from weakened, or attenuated, microbes. He developed the earliest vaccines against fowl cholera, anthrax, and rabies.
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) is revered by his successors in the life sciences as well as by the general public. In fact, his name provided the basis for a household word—pasteurized.
His research, which showed that microorganisms cause both fermentation and disease, supported the germ theory of disease at a time when its validity was still being questioned. In his ongoing quest for disease treatments he created the first vaccines for fowl cholera; anthrax, a major livestock disease that in recent times has been used against humans in germ warfare; and the dreaded rabies.
Early Life and Education
Pasteur was born in Dole, France, the middle child of five in a family that had for generations been leather tanners. Young Pasteur’s gifts seemed to be more artistic than academic until near the end of his years in secondary school. Spurred by his mentors’ encouragement, he undertook rigorous studies to compensate for his academic shortcomings in order to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, the famous teachers’ college in Paris. He earned his master’s degree there in 1845 and his doctorate in 1847.
Study of Optical Activity
While waiting for an appropriate appointment Pasteur continued to work as a laboratory assistant at the École Normale. There he made further progress on the research he had begun for his doctoral dissertation—investigating the ability of certain crystals or solutions to rotate plane-polarized light clockwise or counterclockwise, that is, to exhibit “optical activity.” He was able to show that in many cases this activity related to the shape of the crystals of a compound. He also reasoned that there was some special internal arrangement to the molecules of such a compound that twisted the light—an “asymmetric” arrangement. This hypothesis holds an important place in the early history of structural chemistry—the field of chemistry that studies the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules.
Science History Institute/Gregory Tobias
Fermentation and Pasteurization
Pasteur secured his academic credentials with scientific papers on this and related research and was then appointed in 1848 to the faculty of sciences in Strasbourg and in 1854 to the faculty in Lille. There he launched his studies on fermentation. Pasteur sided with the minority view among his contemporaries that each type of fermentation is carried out by a living microorganism. At the time the majority believed that fermentation was spontaneously generated by a series of chemical reactions in which enzymes—themselves not yet securely identified with life—played a critical role.
In 1857 Pasteur returned to the École Normale as director of scientific studies. In the modest laboratory that he was permitted to establish there, he continued his study of fermentation and fought long, hard battles against the theory of spontaneous generation. Figuring prominently in early rounds of these debates were various applications of his pasteurization process, which he originally invented and patented (in 1865) to fight the “diseases” of wine. He realized that these were caused by unwanted microorganisms that could be destroyed by heating wine to a temperature between 60° and 100°C. The process was later extended to all sorts of other spoilable substances, such as milk.
Germ Theory
At the same time Pasteur began his fermentation studies, he adopted a related view on the cause of diseases. He and a minority of other scientists believed that diseases arose from the activities of microorganisms—germ theory. Opponents believed that diseases, particularly major killer diseases, arose in the first instance from a weakness or imbalance in the internal state and quality of the afflicted individual. In an early foray into the causes of particular diseases, in the 1860s, Pasteur was able to determine the cause of the devastating blight that had befallen the silkworms that were the basis for France’s then-important silk industry. Surprisingly, he found that the guilty parties were two microorganisms rather than one.
A New Laboratory
Pasteur did not, however, fully engage in studies of disease until the late 1870s, after several cataclysmic changes had rocked his life and that of the French nation. In 1868, in the middle of his silkworm studies, he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed his left side. Soon thereafter, in 1870, France suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and Emperor Louis-Napoléon was overthrown. Nevertheless, Pasteur successfully concluded with the new government negotiations he had begun with the emperor. The government agreed to build a new laboratory for him, to relieve him of administrative and teaching duties, and to grant him a pension and a special recompense in order to free his energies for studies of diseases.
Attenuating Microbes for Vaccines: Fowl Cholera and Anthrax
In his research campaign against disease Pasteur first worked on expanding what was known about anthrax, but his attention was quickly drawn to fowl cholera. This investigation led to his discovery of how to make vaccines by attenuating, or weakening, the microbe involved. Pasteur usually “refreshed” the laboratory cultures he was studying—in this case, fowl cholera—every few days; that is, he returned them to virulence by reintroducing them into laboratory chickens with the resulting onslaught of disease and the birds’ death. Months into the experiments, Pasteur let cultures of fowl cholera stand idle while he went on vacation. When he returned and the same procedure was attempted, the chickens did not become diseased as before. Pasteur could easily have deduced that the culture was dead and could not be revived, but instead he was inspired to inoculate the experimental chickens with a virulent culture. Amazingly, the chickens survived and did not become diseased; they were protected by a microbe attenuated over time.
Realizing he had discovered a technique that could be extended to other diseases, Pasteur returned to his study of anthrax. Pasteur produced vaccines from weakened anthrax bacilli that could indeed protect sheep and other animals. In public demonstrations at Pouilly-le-Fort before crowds of observers, twenty-four sheep, one goat, and six cows were subjected to a two-part course of inoculations with the new vaccine, on May 5, 1881, and again on May 17. Meanwhile a control group of twenty-four sheep, one goat, and four cows remained unvaccinated. On May 31 all the animals were inoculated with virulent anthrax bacilli, and two days later, on June 2, the crowd reassembled. Pasteur and his collaborators arrived to great applause. The effects of the vaccine were undeniable: the vaccinated animals were all alive. Of the control animals all the sheep were dead except three wobbly individuals who died by the end of the day, and the four unprotected cows were swollen and feverish. The single goat had expired too.
Science History Institute/Gregory Tobias
Rabies and the Beginnings of the Institut Pasteur
Pasteur then wanted to move into the more difficult area of human disease, in which ethical concerns weighed more heavily. He looked for a disease that afflicts both animals and humans so that most of his experiments could be done on animals, although here too he had strong reservations. Rabies, the disease he chose, had long terrified the populace, even though it was in fact quite rare in humans. Up to the time of Pasteur’s vaccine, a common treatment for a bite by a rabid animal had been cauterization with a red-hot iron in hopes of destroying the unknown cause of the disease, which almost always developed anyway after a typically long incubation period.
Rabies presented new obstacles to the development of a successful vaccine, primarily because the microorganism causing the disease could not be specifically identified; nor could it be cultured in vitro (in the laboratory and not in an animal). As with other infectious diseases, rabies could be injected into other species and attenuated. Attenuation of rabies was first achieved in monkeys and later in rabbits. Meeting with success in protecting dogs, even those already bitten by a rabid animal, on July 6, 1885, Pasteur agreed with some reluctance to treat his first human patient, Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old who was otherwise doomed to a near-certain death. Success in this case and thousands of others convinced a grateful public throughout the world to make contributions to the Institut Pasteur. It was officially opened in 1888 and continues as one of the premier institutions of biomedical research in the world. Its tradition of discovering and producing vaccines is carried on today by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur.
Bert Hansen: How the Public Became Interested in Medical Science
Historian Bert Hansen discusses his book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio.
A Great Experimenter and Innovative Theorist
Pasteur’s career shows him to have been a great experimenter, far less concerned with the theory of disease and immune response than with dealing directly with diseases by creating new vaccines. Still it is possible to discern his notions on the more abstract topics. Early on he linked the immune response to the biological, especially nutritional, requirements of the microorganisms involved; that is, the microbe or the attenuated microbe in the vaccine depleted its food source during its first invasion, making the next onslaught difficult for the microbe. Later he speculated that microbes could produce chemical substances toxic to themselves that circulated throughout the body, thus pointing to the use of toxins and antitoxins in vaccines. He lent support to another view by welcoming to the Institut Pasteur Élie Metchnikoff and his theory that “phagocytes” in the blood—white corpuscles—clear the body of foreign matter and are the prime agents of immunity.
The Artist in the Laboratory
Albert Edelfelt broke the rules when he painted his friend Louis Pasteur in the scientist’s natural element.
In spring 1885 Pasteur invited a young Finnish artist, Albert Edelfelt, to paint a large formal portrait. They had become close friends a few years earlier through Pasteur’s son, Jean-Baptiste, a part-time journalist who often wrote about art.
Edelfelt was responsible for the unprecedented scene in the painting. Portraits of eminent people made at this time rarely included a naturalistic setting and almost never a realistic workplace. The artist recorded his ambitions in a letter home. “Monday, I will again go to see the old fellow Pasteur to see if there is a possibility to make something of him in the laboratory because it is only there, in that environment, that I want to paint him. The old fellow Pasteur in tails and high collar is something ridiculous. No—he has to be in his own element.”
Not only did Pasteur consent to the painter’s presence in the crowded laboratory over several weeks, but he also worked with Edelfelt on the composition. “He has gone through all the accoutrements I placed around him, asking me to take away some of them, ‘the objects that are useless from the scientific point of view,’ and to replace them with other objects.”
The portrait’s huge success at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1886 created a market for prints. Lithographs, etchings, and engravings were used since photographs could not yet capture the tonal range of a canvas over five feet high. Such a handmade reduction required special skill, and Edelfelt was thrilled when he learned that a dealer had commissioned Léopold Flameng to make an etching, pronouncing him “France’s best.” The subtleties of the large painting are preserved exceptionally well even in this modestly sized print (21¼ × 17½ inches).'
2. Background from {[https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/louis-pasteur]}
"Louis Pasteur
Pasteurization
Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, a small town in eastern France. As a youngster he showed talent as an artist, but no special ability in school. This changed however, in his high school years, as he became more and more interested in scientific subjects. In 1842, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree at the Besancon College Royal de la Franche with honors in physics, mathematics, and Latin. He moved on to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris to study physics and chemistry. He received his doctoral degree in 1847.
Eventually Pasteur would solve such scientific mysteries as the generation of ailments like rabies, anthrax and chicken cholera, and contributing to the world’s first and most significant vaccines. He also described the process of fermentation for the first time, invented the process of pasteurization, and developed important scientific theories such as the germ theory of disease. He began his career working as a chemist, studying the shapes of organic crystals. He was able to prove that the organic molecules with the same chemical composition can exist in space in unique stereo specific forms. And with this work, at just 26 years of age, Pasteur launched the new science of stereochemistry.
Pasteur served on the faculty of science of Dijon briefly and then transferred to Strasbourg University where he met and married Marie Laurent. They would later have five children, three of whom died of typhoid fever. This might have helped motivate Pasteur to save people from diseases later in his career. In 1854, Pasteur was appointed Dean and professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences in Lille, France.
In 1856, the father of one of Pasteur’s chemistry students asked him to help him solve some problems he was encountering in his attempt to make alcohol by fermenting beetroot. Often, instead of alcohol, the fermentations yielded lactic acid. At the time, fermentation was believed to be a pure chemical process in which sugar was transformed into alcohol. But in 1857, Pasteur proved that a microscopic plant caused the souring of milk (lactic acid fermentation). Pasteur was able to prove that living cells, the yeast, were responsible for forming alcohol from sugar, and that contaminating microorganisms found in ordinary air could turn the fermentations sour. Next he identified the microorganisms responsible for both normal and abnormal fermentations, and found that through heating wine, beer, milk, or vinegar briefly, certain living organisms could be killed, thereby sterilizing – or “pasteurizing” – the substances.
This lead to Pasteur's thought that if germs were the cause of fermentation, they could also be the cause of contagious diseases. He began to develop his germ theory of disease, and eventually, to his work on vaccinations. In the 1870s, Pasteur had been attempting to solve the serious problem farmers were having with chicken cholera. The disease could spread through an entire farm in three days. While Pasteur and colleagues had been culturing the cholera microbes and injecting them into test chickens, they found that if they injected the birds with live microbes after they had already been injected with a weaker quantity of the organisms, that they would be unaffected.
This discovery lead Pasteur to wonder if it could also work for anthrax, a disease that was especially devastating to sheep and cattle. In 1881, Pasteur successfully demonstrated his anthrax vaccine to the public. Within ten years more than 3.5 million sheep and a half million cattle had been vaccinated with a mortality of less than one percent. This work lead to Pasteur’s identification of the germs causing many other diseases, such as swine erysipelas, childbirth fever and pneumonia. Pasteur is also credited for installing physicians’ adoption of the rules of antiseptic medicine and surgery.
In 1885, Pasteur was lauded for one of his most famous developments -- a vaccine against rabies (or “hydrophobia”). He had successfully vaccinated dogs against the disease; soon after the vaccine was tested successfully on humans. Subsequently, the Pasteur Institute was built in Paris to treat victims of rabies. Additional Pasteur Institutes were later built around the world to treat with rabies and other diseases.
Pasteur died in 1895 after suffering multiple strokes. He was buried, a national hero, by the French Government in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and his remains were transferred to a permanent crypt in the Pasteur Institute, Paris.'
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Louis Pasteur Documentary The Father of Germ Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR_2Zyc--SQ
Image
1. Louis Pasteur with 9-year-old boy Joseph Meister who was the first human to receive Pasteur's rabies vaccination.
2. 1886 print of Louis Pasteur pursuing a rabies vaccine in this etching by young Finnish artist, Léopold Flameng.
Louis Pasteur holds a drying bottle, contemplating a piece of nerve tissue from a rabid rabbit. He’s using the bottle to attenuate the deadly hydrophobia virus, the key to his lifesaving rabies shots. In this brilliant portrait there is no sign of friendship, but it was fundamental to the painting’s creation.
3. Joseph Meister, who received inoculation of the rabies vaccine from Pasteur in July 1885
4. Louis Pasteur 'When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.'
Biographies
1. sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/louis-pasteur
2. lemelson.mit.edu/resources/louis-pasteur
1. Background from {[https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/louis-pasteur]}
Louis Pasteur
During the mid- to late 19th century Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms cause disease and discovered how to make vaccines from weakened, or attenuated, microbes. He developed the earliest vaccines against fowl cholera, anthrax, and rabies.
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) is revered by his successors in the life sciences as well as by the general public. In fact, his name provided the basis for a household word—pasteurized.
His research, which showed that microorganisms cause both fermentation and disease, supported the germ theory of disease at a time when its validity was still being questioned. In his ongoing quest for disease treatments he created the first vaccines for fowl cholera; anthrax, a major livestock disease that in recent times has been used against humans in germ warfare; and the dreaded rabies.
Early Life and Education
Pasteur was born in Dole, France, the middle child of five in a family that had for generations been leather tanners. Young Pasteur’s gifts seemed to be more artistic than academic until near the end of his years in secondary school. Spurred by his mentors’ encouragement, he undertook rigorous studies to compensate for his academic shortcomings in order to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, the famous teachers’ college in Paris. He earned his master’s degree there in 1845 and his doctorate in 1847.
Study of Optical Activity
While waiting for an appropriate appointment Pasteur continued to work as a laboratory assistant at the École Normale. There he made further progress on the research he had begun for his doctoral dissertation—investigating the ability of certain crystals or solutions to rotate plane-polarized light clockwise or counterclockwise, that is, to exhibit “optical activity.” He was able to show that in many cases this activity related to the shape of the crystals of a compound. He also reasoned that there was some special internal arrangement to the molecules of such a compound that twisted the light—an “asymmetric” arrangement. This hypothesis holds an important place in the early history of structural chemistry—the field of chemistry that studies the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules.
Science History Institute/Gregory Tobias
Fermentation and Pasteurization
Pasteur secured his academic credentials with scientific papers on this and related research and was then appointed in 1848 to the faculty of sciences in Strasbourg and in 1854 to the faculty in Lille. There he launched his studies on fermentation. Pasteur sided with the minority view among his contemporaries that each type of fermentation is carried out by a living microorganism. At the time the majority believed that fermentation was spontaneously generated by a series of chemical reactions in which enzymes—themselves not yet securely identified with life—played a critical role.
In 1857 Pasteur returned to the École Normale as director of scientific studies. In the modest laboratory that he was permitted to establish there, he continued his study of fermentation and fought long, hard battles against the theory of spontaneous generation. Figuring prominently in early rounds of these debates were various applications of his pasteurization process, which he originally invented and patented (in 1865) to fight the “diseases” of wine. He realized that these were caused by unwanted microorganisms that could be destroyed by heating wine to a temperature between 60° and 100°C. The process was later extended to all sorts of other spoilable substances, such as milk.
Germ Theory
At the same time Pasteur began his fermentation studies, he adopted a related view on the cause of diseases. He and a minority of other scientists believed that diseases arose from the activities of microorganisms—germ theory. Opponents believed that diseases, particularly major killer diseases, arose in the first instance from a weakness or imbalance in the internal state and quality of the afflicted individual. In an early foray into the causes of particular diseases, in the 1860s, Pasteur was able to determine the cause of the devastating blight that had befallen the silkworms that were the basis for France’s then-important silk industry. Surprisingly, he found that the guilty parties were two microorganisms rather than one.
A New Laboratory
Pasteur did not, however, fully engage in studies of disease until the late 1870s, after several cataclysmic changes had rocked his life and that of the French nation. In 1868, in the middle of his silkworm studies, he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed his left side. Soon thereafter, in 1870, France suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and Emperor Louis-Napoléon was overthrown. Nevertheless, Pasteur successfully concluded with the new government negotiations he had begun with the emperor. The government agreed to build a new laboratory for him, to relieve him of administrative and teaching duties, and to grant him a pension and a special recompense in order to free his energies for studies of diseases.
Attenuating Microbes for Vaccines: Fowl Cholera and Anthrax
In his research campaign against disease Pasteur first worked on expanding what was known about anthrax, but his attention was quickly drawn to fowl cholera. This investigation led to his discovery of how to make vaccines by attenuating, or weakening, the microbe involved. Pasteur usually “refreshed” the laboratory cultures he was studying—in this case, fowl cholera—every few days; that is, he returned them to virulence by reintroducing them into laboratory chickens with the resulting onslaught of disease and the birds’ death. Months into the experiments, Pasteur let cultures of fowl cholera stand idle while he went on vacation. When he returned and the same procedure was attempted, the chickens did not become diseased as before. Pasteur could easily have deduced that the culture was dead and could not be revived, but instead he was inspired to inoculate the experimental chickens with a virulent culture. Amazingly, the chickens survived and did not become diseased; they were protected by a microbe attenuated over time.
Realizing he had discovered a technique that could be extended to other diseases, Pasteur returned to his study of anthrax. Pasteur produced vaccines from weakened anthrax bacilli that could indeed protect sheep and other animals. In public demonstrations at Pouilly-le-Fort before crowds of observers, twenty-four sheep, one goat, and six cows were subjected to a two-part course of inoculations with the new vaccine, on May 5, 1881, and again on May 17. Meanwhile a control group of twenty-four sheep, one goat, and four cows remained unvaccinated. On May 31 all the animals were inoculated with virulent anthrax bacilli, and two days later, on June 2, the crowd reassembled. Pasteur and his collaborators arrived to great applause. The effects of the vaccine were undeniable: the vaccinated animals were all alive. Of the control animals all the sheep were dead except three wobbly individuals who died by the end of the day, and the four unprotected cows were swollen and feverish. The single goat had expired too.
Science History Institute/Gregory Tobias
Rabies and the Beginnings of the Institut Pasteur
Pasteur then wanted to move into the more difficult area of human disease, in which ethical concerns weighed more heavily. He looked for a disease that afflicts both animals and humans so that most of his experiments could be done on animals, although here too he had strong reservations. Rabies, the disease he chose, had long terrified the populace, even though it was in fact quite rare in humans. Up to the time of Pasteur’s vaccine, a common treatment for a bite by a rabid animal had been cauterization with a red-hot iron in hopes of destroying the unknown cause of the disease, which almost always developed anyway after a typically long incubation period.
Rabies presented new obstacles to the development of a successful vaccine, primarily because the microorganism causing the disease could not be specifically identified; nor could it be cultured in vitro (in the laboratory and not in an animal). As with other infectious diseases, rabies could be injected into other species and attenuated. Attenuation of rabies was first achieved in monkeys and later in rabbits. Meeting with success in protecting dogs, even those already bitten by a rabid animal, on July 6, 1885, Pasteur agreed with some reluctance to treat his first human patient, Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old who was otherwise doomed to a near-certain death. Success in this case and thousands of others convinced a grateful public throughout the world to make contributions to the Institut Pasteur. It was officially opened in 1888 and continues as one of the premier institutions of biomedical research in the world. Its tradition of discovering and producing vaccines is carried on today by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur.
Bert Hansen: How the Public Became Interested in Medical Science
Historian Bert Hansen discusses his book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio.
A Great Experimenter and Innovative Theorist
Pasteur’s career shows him to have been a great experimenter, far less concerned with the theory of disease and immune response than with dealing directly with diseases by creating new vaccines. Still it is possible to discern his notions on the more abstract topics. Early on he linked the immune response to the biological, especially nutritional, requirements of the microorganisms involved; that is, the microbe or the attenuated microbe in the vaccine depleted its food source during its first invasion, making the next onslaught difficult for the microbe. Later he speculated that microbes could produce chemical substances toxic to themselves that circulated throughout the body, thus pointing to the use of toxins and antitoxins in vaccines. He lent support to another view by welcoming to the Institut Pasteur Élie Metchnikoff and his theory that “phagocytes” in the blood—white corpuscles—clear the body of foreign matter and are the prime agents of immunity.
The Artist in the Laboratory
Albert Edelfelt broke the rules when he painted his friend Louis Pasteur in the scientist’s natural element.
In spring 1885 Pasteur invited a young Finnish artist, Albert Edelfelt, to paint a large formal portrait. They had become close friends a few years earlier through Pasteur’s son, Jean-Baptiste, a part-time journalist who often wrote about art.
Edelfelt was responsible for the unprecedented scene in the painting. Portraits of eminent people made at this time rarely included a naturalistic setting and almost never a realistic workplace. The artist recorded his ambitions in a letter home. “Monday, I will again go to see the old fellow Pasteur to see if there is a possibility to make something of him in the laboratory because it is only there, in that environment, that I want to paint him. The old fellow Pasteur in tails and high collar is something ridiculous. No—he has to be in his own element.”
Not only did Pasteur consent to the painter’s presence in the crowded laboratory over several weeks, but he also worked with Edelfelt on the composition. “He has gone through all the accoutrements I placed around him, asking me to take away some of them, ‘the objects that are useless from the scientific point of view,’ and to replace them with other objects.”
The portrait’s huge success at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1886 created a market for prints. Lithographs, etchings, and engravings were used since photographs could not yet capture the tonal range of a canvas over five feet high. Such a handmade reduction required special skill, and Edelfelt was thrilled when he learned that a dealer had commissioned Léopold Flameng to make an etching, pronouncing him “France’s best.” The subtleties of the large painting are preserved exceptionally well even in this modestly sized print (21¼ × 17½ inches).'
2. Background from {[https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/louis-pasteur]}
"Louis Pasteur
Pasteurization
Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, a small town in eastern France. As a youngster he showed talent as an artist, but no special ability in school. This changed however, in his high school years, as he became more and more interested in scientific subjects. In 1842, he completed his Bachelor of Science degree at the Besancon College Royal de la Franche with honors in physics, mathematics, and Latin. He moved on to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris to study physics and chemistry. He received his doctoral degree in 1847.
Eventually Pasteur would solve such scientific mysteries as the generation of ailments like rabies, anthrax and chicken cholera, and contributing to the world’s first and most significant vaccines. He also described the process of fermentation for the first time, invented the process of pasteurization, and developed important scientific theories such as the germ theory of disease. He began his career working as a chemist, studying the shapes of organic crystals. He was able to prove that the organic molecules with the same chemical composition can exist in space in unique stereo specific forms. And with this work, at just 26 years of age, Pasteur launched the new science of stereochemistry.
Pasteur served on the faculty of science of Dijon briefly and then transferred to Strasbourg University where he met and married Marie Laurent. They would later have five children, three of whom died of typhoid fever. This might have helped motivate Pasteur to save people from diseases later in his career. In 1854, Pasteur was appointed Dean and professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences in Lille, France.
In 1856, the father of one of Pasteur’s chemistry students asked him to help him solve some problems he was encountering in his attempt to make alcohol by fermenting beetroot. Often, instead of alcohol, the fermentations yielded lactic acid. At the time, fermentation was believed to be a pure chemical process in which sugar was transformed into alcohol. But in 1857, Pasteur proved that a microscopic plant caused the souring of milk (lactic acid fermentation). Pasteur was able to prove that living cells, the yeast, were responsible for forming alcohol from sugar, and that contaminating microorganisms found in ordinary air could turn the fermentations sour. Next he identified the microorganisms responsible for both normal and abnormal fermentations, and found that through heating wine, beer, milk, or vinegar briefly, certain living organisms could be killed, thereby sterilizing – or “pasteurizing” – the substances.
This lead to Pasteur's thought that if germs were the cause of fermentation, they could also be the cause of contagious diseases. He began to develop his germ theory of disease, and eventually, to his work on vaccinations. In the 1870s, Pasteur had been attempting to solve the serious problem farmers were having with chicken cholera. The disease could spread through an entire farm in three days. While Pasteur and colleagues had been culturing the cholera microbes and injecting them into test chickens, they found that if they injected the birds with live microbes after they had already been injected with a weaker quantity of the organisms, that they would be unaffected.
This discovery lead Pasteur to wonder if it could also work for anthrax, a disease that was especially devastating to sheep and cattle. In 1881, Pasteur successfully demonstrated his anthrax vaccine to the public. Within ten years more than 3.5 million sheep and a half million cattle had been vaccinated with a mortality of less than one percent. This work lead to Pasteur’s identification of the germs causing many other diseases, such as swine erysipelas, childbirth fever and pneumonia. Pasteur is also credited for installing physicians’ adoption of the rules of antiseptic medicine and surgery.
In 1885, Pasteur was lauded for one of his most famous developments -- a vaccine against rabies (or “hydrophobia”). He had successfully vaccinated dogs against the disease; soon after the vaccine was tested successfully on humans. Subsequently, the Pasteur Institute was built in Paris to treat victims of rabies. Additional Pasteur Institutes were later built around the world to treat with rabies and other diseases.
Pasteur died in 1895 after suffering multiple strokes. He was buried, a national hero, by the French Government in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and his remains were transferred to a permanent crypt in the Pasteur Institute, Paris.'
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TSgt George Rodriguez SPC Matthew Lamb PFC Richard Hughes SSG Chad Henning PO2 (Join to see) COL Mikel J. Burroughs 1SG Steven ImermanSSG Samuel KermonSP5 Geoffrey VannersonSFC Richard WilliamsonSSG Robert "Rob" WentworthCapt Rich Buckley Maj Marty Hogan
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Louis Pasteur - Scientist | Mini Bio | BIO
Watch a short biography video of Louis Pasteur, who is best known for his development of pasteurization and vaccines for rabies and anthrax. #Biography Subsc...
Louis Pasteur - Scientist | Mini Bio | BIO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXdbQ1JkX7c
Images
1. Louis Pasteur and his wife Marie [nee Laurent]
2. Portrait of Louis Pasteur by photographer Nadar, pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon
3.Front Marie and Louis Pasteur with their grandchildren Louis and Camille. Rear Pierre Vallery-Radot, René Vallery-Radot and his wife Marie-Louise Pasteur
FYI SFC (Join to see) SFC David Reid, M.S, PHR, SHRM-CP, DTMA1C Ian WilliamsCpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrPVT Kenneth Krause SPC Jon O.MAJ Raúl RoviraSP5 Jeannie Carle
SPC Chris Bayner-CwikTSgt David L.PO1 Robert GeorgeSGT John MelvinSSG Robert Mark OdomSPC Matthew LambSPC Russ Bolton SPC Nancy Greene SSG Franklin Briant MSG Andrew White Sgt Steven B Crane Ed-d-c-MBAMaj Scott Kiger, M.A.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXdbQ1JkX7c
Images
1. Louis Pasteur and his wife Marie [nee Laurent]
2. Portrait of Louis Pasteur by photographer Nadar, pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon
3.Front Marie and Louis Pasteur with their grandchildren Louis and Camille. Rear Pierre Vallery-Radot, René Vallery-Radot and his wife Marie-Louise Pasteur
FYI SFC (Join to see) SFC David Reid, M.S, PHR, SHRM-CP, DTMA1C Ian WilliamsCpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrPVT Kenneth Krause SPC Jon O.MAJ Raúl RoviraSP5 Jeannie Carle
SPC Chris Bayner-CwikTSgt David L.PO1 Robert GeorgeSGT John MelvinSSG Robert Mark OdomSPC Matthew LambSPC Russ Bolton SPC Nancy Greene SSG Franklin Briant MSG Andrew White Sgt Steven B Crane Ed-d-c-MBAMaj Scott Kiger, M.A.S.
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May GOD ALMIGHTY HIMSELF; both eternally, and, infinitely bless you; the late Mr. Louis Pasteur. SGT (Join to see)
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