50 Fun Facts About Louis Pasteur

Pasteur was born in 1822 in the town of Dole, in which part of eastern France?

Jura: the department takes its name from the Jura Mountains, whose limestone also gave the Jurassic period its name.

What was the trade of Pasteur's father Jean-Joseph?

Tanner: generations of Pasteurs had worked leather, and at 15 the tanner's son grew so unhappy at a Paris boarding school that he came home within weeks.

As a boy Pasteur was an average student whose real interests were fishing and what?

Sketching: he drew pastel portraits of the townspeople, until encouragement from his teachers pushed him into rigorous study.

Which elite Paris school did Pasteur enter in 1843, on his second attempt at the entrance exam?

The Ecole Normale Superieure had admitted him in 1842, but unhappy with his low rank he declined, studied another year and came in fourth.

Pasteur's wife Marie Laurent was the daughter of the rector of which university, where he held a chair?

Strasbourg is where he courted Marie Laurent, who went on to serve as his secretary, taking down his work by dictation.

Pasteur famously said that in the field of observation, chance favours only the what?

Prepared mind: he said it in 1854 on becoming dean of Lille's new science faculty, where local manufacturers soon brought him their spoilage problems.

What job did the boy who got Pasteur's rabies vaccine in July 1885 later hold at the Pasteur Institute?

Caretaker was his job, and an often-repeated story says he died in 1940 rather than open Pasteur's crypt to German soldiers, though his family's account differs.

Pasteur's closeness to which ruler made him unpopular with republican students in Paris?

Napoleon III invited him to court festivities at Compiègne, and in 1867 a clash with protesting students cost Pasteur his administrator post.

At the Pasteur Institute of Lille, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin developed a vaccine against which disease?

Tuberculosis was the target, and they weakened a cattle form of the germ by growing it again and again on a bile-based medium for 13 years.

Pasteur's early work on tartrate crystals was the first demonstration of what?

Molecular chirality was the finding, and Pasteur reached it by sorting two shapes of tartrate crystal by hand.

How did the solutions of the two kinds of tartrate crystal that Pasteur separated differ?

They rotate polarised light oppositely, which is why racemic acid, an equal mix of both forms, does not rotate it at all.

Which crop did the Lille manufacturer who asked Pasteur about souring alcohol use to make it?

Beetroot was the crop, and Pasteur went regularly to the distillery itself to track down why the alcohol was spoiling.

Which German chemist argued, against Pasteur, that fermentation was chemical decomposition rather than the work of living cells?

Justus von Liebig saw it as pure chemistry, and in 1897 Eduard Buchner showed that yeast juice with no living cells could still ferment sugar.

Pasteur's 1857 memoir described a living ferment that turns sugar into which acid?

Lactic acid was the product, and Pasteur isolated this ferment and grew it as a pure culture.

The autoclave, which grew out of work by one of Pasteur's assistants in 1879, sterilises instruments with what?

Pressurised steam gets hotter than boiling water, around 121 °C, so it kills bacterial spores that survive ordinary boiling.

Pasteur patented his heating process in 1865 to fight the 'diseases' of what?

Wine was the target: briefly heating a young wine to about 50 to 60 °C killed the germs that turned it sour.

Pasteur's ideas about keeping microbes out of the body inspired which surgeon's antiseptic methods?

Joseph Lister, after reading Pasteur, began treating wounds with carbolic acid to kill the germs he now blamed for infection.

Under Pasteur's pebrine method, what did silk farmers destroy when a female moth showed infection under the microscope?

Her eggs had to go, because infected mother moths pass the infection on and the worms that hatch from those eggs die.

Pebrine, the silkworm disease Pasteur fought, is now known to be caused by what?

A microsporidian, Nosema bombycis, is the culprit; Pasteur at first took its corpuscles for a symptom before accepting them as the cause.

Which chemist and senator asked Pasteur in 1865 to investigate a disease killing silkworms?

Jean-Baptiste Dumas called on him because the epidemic was ruining France's silk industry, so Pasteur took his microscope to the south of France.

Which Rouen museum director was Pasteur's chief opponent in the debate over spontaneous generation?

Felix Pouchet said life could arise spontaneously in liquids, and the Academy set up the Alhumbert Prize to settle the dispute.

What distinctive shape of flask did Pasteur use to disprove spontaneous generation?

Swan-neck flasks kept boiled broth clear while they stood upright, but tipping one so the broth touched the neck soon clouded it.

When Pasteur opened flasks of boiled broth at different altitudes, why did fewer grow organisms high up?

Less dust in the air meant fewer germs, evidence that germs arrive from outside instead of arising in the broth.

Which Irish physicist, who measured how gases such as carbon dioxide absorb heat, also helped disprove spontaneous generation?

John Tyndall found that some bacteria survive boiling as spores and devised a way to kill them.

Which of Pasteur's assistants built a porcelain filter whose pores were too small for bacteria to pass?

Charles Chamberland's filter caught bacteria, and infectious sap that still passed through such filters gave the first evidence that viruses exist.

Pasteur believed his chicken cholera bacteria were weakened by contact with what?

Oxygen was his explanation: cultures kept sealed kept their virulence, while those left exposed to air could serve as vaccines.

Where did Pasteur's public anthrax vaccine trial take place in May 1881?

Pouilly-le-Fort drew a crowd, which on 2 June found every vaccinated animal still alive.

Pasteur's notebooks show the anthrax vaccine used at his 1881 trial was treated with what?

Potassium dichromate was the agent, and after the trial's success requests for the vaccine flooded into Pasteur's laboratory.

Henry Toussaint, who developed an anthrax vaccine before Pasteur, was what by profession?

A veterinary surgeon who studied chicken cholera, Toussaint also supplied the germ Pasteur worked on, later named Pasteurella after Pasteur.

Pasteur gave his artificially weakened pathogens the name 'vaccines' in honour of whom?

Edward Jenner had protected people from smallpox with cowpox, so the word 'vaccine' comes from vacca, Latin for cow.

Which German rival wrote that Pasteur had used impure cultures and made errors?

Robert Koch doubted that vaccination against anthrax was possible, so Pasteur sent his assistant Louis Thuillier to Germany to run a field trial.

Pasteur showed anthrax spores were brought to the surface of 'cursed fields' by what?

Earthworms carried them up: he found anthrax bacteria in their droppings and told farmers to stop burying dead animals in fields.

Which nine-year-old boy received Pasteur's rabies vaccine in July 1885 after being mauled by a dog?

Joseph Meister had been badly bitten, and the doctors who examined him judged that he would develop rabies.

Why did treating a bitten boy with his rabies vaccine in 1885 expose Pasteur to prosecution?

He was not a licensed physician, so practising doctors oversaw the treatment and one of them gave the injections.

Emile Roux's team at the Pasteur Institute produced a serum against which disease, a major killer of children?

Diphtheria does its damage through a toxin, as Roux and Alexandre Yersin showed, so a serum against that toxin could treat it.

Roux's rabies vaccine method grew the virus in rabbits and weakened it by drying what?

Nerve tissue from infected rabbits' spinal cords was dried to weaken the virus, and Pasteur had used it to protect dogs before trying it on a boy.

Which insects did Charles Nicolle, director of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, show carry epidemic typhus?

Lice were the carriers: Nicolle saw that typhus patients stopped infecting others once they had bathed and changed their clothes.

Which discoverer of phagocytes ran a research department at the Pasteur Institute from its first years?

Elie Metchnikoff found phagocytes in 1882 by pushing small thorns into starfish larvae and watching cells gather around them.

Pasteur's tomb beneath the Pasteur Institute is decorated with mosaics in which style?

Byzantine mosaics picturing his work cover the crypt, where his body was moved in 1896.

Gerald Geison's 1995 study of Pasteur's private notebooks accused him of what?

Deception in reporting discoveries was the charge, drawn from gaps between his notebooks and public claims, but Max Perutz called Geison the guilty one.

Which disease's bacterium did Alexandre Yersin, a former worker in Pasteur's lab, identify in Hong Kong in 1894?

Plague was the disease, and Yersin also found the same germ in rats, though how it passed from rats to people eluded him.

Which chemist claimed priority over Pasteur on microbes in yeast action and proposed the mistaken 'microzyme' theory?

Antoine Bechamp's rivalry with Pasteur spread to the silkworm disease pébrine, and he ended up rejecting germ theory itself.

Like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur is honoured as a father of which science?

Microbiology also claims Leeuwenhoek as a father because he watched bacteria through single-lens microscopes he made himself.

Which drink's diseases were the subject of Pasteur's 1876 book?

Beer was the subject, and his heating method was soon being used to keep beer from souring.

Pasteur sent Albert Calmette to found a branch of his institute in 1891 in which Asian city?

Saigon's branch had Calmette studying snake venom, work that led him to an antivenom made from the serum of vaccinated horses.

Pasteur's family settled in which town when he was a boy, where he later attended secondary school?

Arbois friends later urged him to run for the Senate in 1876, and he lost heavily.

Who donated Pasteur's long-hidden notebooks to the French national library in 1964?

His grandson Pasteur Vallery-Radot handed them over, having spent his life collecting and editing his grandfather's papers.

Which Royal Society honour did Pasteur receive in 1874 for his work on fermentation?

The Copley Medal cited his research on fermentation and pébrine, yet his silkworm methods, which halted pébrine, never conquered another disease, flacherie.

Pasteur began his fermentation research by repeating whose earlier work showing yeast was alive?

The opposing camp of Liebig, Wöhler and Berzelius insisted yeast was merely a product of air acting on plant juice.

In 1881 Pasteur took a seat at the Académie française left vacant by which writer?

Émile Littré, compiler of the famous Littré dictionary, had been fought so bitterly by Bishop Dupanloup that the bishop refused to sit alongside him.