Louis Pasteur

While working as a professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, he fell in love with Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector, and married her in 1849. The couple had five children, but only two of them survived to adulthood. The other three died of diseases and these personal tragedies strengthened Pasteur’s resolve to find cures for infectious diseases.

He suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1868. He was severely impaired following a stroke in 1894 stroke and never recovered fully. He died on September 28, 1895 and was given a state funeral.

Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, Jura, France, as the third child of Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. His father was a tanner who had served as a sergeant major during the Napoleonic Wars.

He was a creative young boy who loved to draw and paint. He was an average student in school and displayed little interest in academics.

After completing his primary education he joined the Collège Royal de Besançon in 1839 and he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (1840) and Bachelor of Science degree (1842).

He entered the École Normale Supérieure (a teachers’ college in Paris) in 1843 and received his Master of Science degree in 1845 and then acquired an advanced degree in physical sciences. He later earned his doctorate in sciences in 1847.

In 1848, he was appointed professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée. However, he quit the job to become professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg the same year.

He became the dean of the new faculty of sciences at Lille University in 1854 where he began his studies on fermentation. Through his experiments, he demonstrated that fermentation is caused by the growth of micro-organisms, and that the growth of bacteria is due to biogenesis and not due to spontaneous generation as was normally believed at that time.

In 1857, he was selected to be the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure where he served till 1867. There he introduced several reforms, which were often very rigid. This helped to increase the institution’s prestige, but also instigated two major student revolts.

He became a professor of geology, physics, and chemistry at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1862 and held this position until his resignation in 1867.

His research in fermentation showed that the growth of micro-organisms was responsible for spoiling beverages, such as beer, wine and milk. He went on to invent a process in which the beverages were heated to a temperature between 60 and 100 °C which killed most bacteria already present within them. He patented the method, which became known as pasteurization in 1865.

Louis Pasteur is best remembered for developing the process of what came to be known as “Pasteurization”, in which beverages like beer, wine, or milk are heated up to a certain temperature in order to reduce the number of viable pathogens so they are unlikely to cause disease. The process is today widely used in the food industry.

He also achieved considerable fame for developing the first vaccine for rabies. Pasteur and his colleagues were working on a rabies vaccine that had been tested on 50 dogs but was yet to be tested on a human. Pasteur first administered the vaccine to a nine-year old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog in 1885. The boy did not develop rabies and lived to become an adult.