Louis Pasteur Trivia
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50 free Louis Pasteur trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Louis Pasteur trivia quiz covers the chemist who never held a medical licence yet did more for medicine than almost any doctor. The easy questions handle pasteurisation, the swan-neck flask, the rabies vaccine and the 'prepared mind'. From there it moves through the life: the tanner father, the boy who preferred sketching, the mediocre chemistry grade, the mutton-stew revolt, the mirror-image crystals that were arguably his greatest discovery, and the silkworms of the Cevennes. The harder end covers the Alhumbert Prize, the flasks opened on mountain tops, the rival Pouchet, the chicken cholera that would not stay virulent, the sheep at Pouilly-le-Fort and what the notebooks later revealed about the vaccine, the boy Joseph Meister and the doctor who actually held the syringe, the earthworms in the cursed fields, the quarrel with Koch, and the Byzantine mosaics over his tomb. Every answer was checked against Pasteur's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Pasteur was born in 1822 in the town of Dole, in which part of eastern France?
Jura
Jura: the department takes its name from the Jura Mountains, whose limestone also gave the Jurassic period its name.
Q 02What was the trade of Pasteur's father Jean-Joseph?
Tanner
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.
Q 03As a boy Pasteur was an average student whose real interests were fishing and what?
Sketching
Sketching: he drew pastel portraits of the townspeople, until encouragement from his teachers pushed him into rigorous study.
Q 04Which elite Paris school did Pasteur enter in 1843, on his second attempt at the entrance exam?
The Ecole Normale Superieure
The Ecole Normale Superieure had admitted him in 1842, but unhappy with his low rank he declined, studied another year and came in fourth.
Q 05Pasteur's wife Marie Laurent was the daughter of the rector of which university, where he held a chair?
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is where he courted Marie Laurent, who went on to serve as his secretary, taking down his work by dictation.
Q 06Pasteur famously said that in the field of observation, chance favours only the what?
Prepared mind
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.
Q 07What job did the boy who got Pasteur's rabies vaccine in July 1885 later hold at the Pasteur Institute?
Caretaker
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.
Q 08Pasteur's closeness to which ruler made him unpopular with republican students in Paris?
Napoleon III
Napoleon III invited him to court festivities at Compiègne, and in 1867 a clash with protesting students cost Pasteur his administrator post.
Q 09At the Pasteur Institute of Lille, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin developed a vaccine against which disease?
Tuberculosis
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.
Q 10Pasteur's early work on tartrate crystals was the first demonstration of what?
Molecular chirality
Molecular chirality was the finding, and Pasteur reached it by sorting two shapes of tartrate crystal by hand.
Q 11How did the solutions of the two kinds of tartrate crystal that Pasteur separated differ?
Rotate polarised light oppositely
They rotate polarised light oppositely, which is why racemic acid, an equal mix of both forms, does not rotate it at all.
Q 12Which crop did the Lille manufacturer who asked Pasteur about souring alcohol use to make it?
Beetroot
Beetroot was the crop, and Pasteur went regularly to the distillery itself to track down why the alcohol was spoiling.
Q 13Which German chemist argued, against Pasteur, that fermentation was chemical decomposition rather than the work of living cells?
Justus von Liebig
Q 21Which Rouen museum director was Pasteur's chief opponent in the debate over spontaneous generation?
Felix Pouchet
Felix Pouchet said life could arise spontaneously in liquids, and the Academy set up the Alhumbert Prize to settle the dispute.
Q 22What distinctive shape of flask did Pasteur use to disprove spontaneous generation?
Swan-neck
Swan-neck flasks kept boiled broth clear while they stood upright, but tipping one so the broth touched the neck soon clouded it.
Q 23When Pasteur opened flasks of boiled broth at different altitudes, why did fewer grow organisms high up?
Less dust in the air
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.
Q 14Pasteur's 1857 memoir described a living ferment that turns sugar into which acid?
Lactic acid
Lactic acid was the product, and Pasteur isolated this ferment and grew it as a pure culture.
Q 15The autoclave, which grew out of work by one of Pasteur's assistants in 1879, sterilises instruments with what?
Pressurised steam
Pressurised steam gets hotter than boiling water, around 121 °C, so it kills bacterial spores that survive ordinary boiling.
Q 16Pasteur patented his heating process in 1865 to fight the 'diseases' of what?
Wine
Wine was the target: briefly heating a young wine to about 50 to 60 °C killed the germs that turned it sour.
Q 17Pasteur's ideas about keeping microbes out of the body inspired which surgeon's antiseptic methods?
Joseph Lister
Joseph Lister, after reading Pasteur, began treating wounds with carbolic acid to kill the germs he now blamed for infection.
Q 18Under Pasteur's pebrine method, what did silk farmers destroy when a female moth showed infection under the microscope?
Her eggs
Her eggs had to go, because infected mother moths pass the infection on and the worms that hatch from those eggs die.
Q 19Pebrine, the silkworm disease Pasteur fought, is now known to be caused by what?
A microsporidian
A microsporidian, Nosema bombycis, is the culprit; Pasteur at first took its corpuscles for a symptom before accepting them as the cause.
Q 20Which chemist and senator asked Pasteur in 1865 to investigate a disease killing silkworms?
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
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.
Less dust in the air meant fewer germs, evidence that germs arrive from outside instead of arising in the broth.
Q 24Which Irish physicist, who measured how gases such as carbon dioxide absorb heat, also helped disprove spontaneous generation?
John Tyndall
John Tyndall found that some bacteria survive boiling as spores and devised a way to kill them.
Q 25Which of Pasteur's assistants built a porcelain filter whose pores were too small for bacteria to pass?
Charles Chamberland
Charles Chamberland's filter caught bacteria, and infectious sap that still passed through such filters gave the first evidence that viruses exist.
Q 26Pasteur believed his chicken cholera bacteria were weakened by contact with what?
Oxygen
Oxygen was his explanation: cultures kept sealed kept their virulence, while those left exposed to air could serve as vaccines.
Q 27Where did Pasteur's public anthrax vaccine trial take place in May 1881?
Pouilly-le-Fort
Pouilly-le-Fort drew a crowd, which on 2 June found every vaccinated animal still alive.
Q 28Pasteur's notebooks show the anthrax vaccine used at his 1881 trial was treated with what?
Potassium dichromate
Potassium dichromate was the agent, and after the trial's success requests for the vaccine flooded into Pasteur's laboratory.
Q 29Henry Toussaint, who developed an anthrax vaccine before Pasteur, was what by profession?
A veterinary surgeon
A veterinary surgeon who studied chicken cholera, Toussaint also supplied the germ Pasteur worked on, later named Pasteurella after Pasteur.
Q 30Pasteur gave his artificially weakened pathogens the name 'vaccines' in honour of whom?
Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner had protected people from smallpox with cowpox, so the word 'vaccine' comes from vacca, Latin for cow.