A Key Figure in Food Safety

In 1847, he defended his theses in chemistry and physics and was awarded his doctor of sciences. His first major discovery, molecular asymmetry, came in 1848. In 1849, the same year as the California Gold Rush, he became acting professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg and married Marie Laurent, the university rector’s daughter. Two daughters and one son were born from 1850 to 1853, followed by two more daughters in 1858 and 1863. In 1854, Pasteur was appointed professor of chemistry and dean of the Faculty of Sciences in Lille, France. The following year, according to the Pasteur Foundation, he started his research on fermentation.

He tackled the theory of spontaneous generation in 1859, and in 1861—the year the U.S. Civil War began—he discovered anaerobic life, which does not require oxygen to grow. By this time, Pasteur was deeply into the study of fermentation.

In 1863, Emperor Napoleon III asked Pasteur to study diseases that spoil wine, an important economic product in France, and in 1864 he set up a lab in Arbois near a vineyard to conduct that research. Only a few years later, in 1867, he won the Grand Prize of the Exposition Universelle for what became known as pasteurization, his method of preserving wine by heating it, after publishing a book on the subject the year before.

In 1868, Pasteur suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side. He opened a new lab in Arbois in 1875 to study fermentation, and the following year tried his hand at politics by entering a Senate race, which he lost. It was in that same year that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in the United States.

After that, Pasteur turned to medical studies, with research on infectious diseases and rabies, and, in 1884, publicized the general principle of vaccinations against infectious diseases, according to the Pasteur Foundation. In December 1885, his rabies vaccination was given to four American boys who traveled to Paris and subsequently returned to the United States in good health. In that same year, the Statue of Liberty was inaugurated in New York.

On his 75th birthday, in 1892, he was honored at the Sorbonne. Pasteur died at Marnes-la-Coquette on Sept. 28, 1895, from complications of a series of strokes, in the same year the Limiere Brothers projected the first moving picture before a public audience in France and Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray in Germany. Pasteur was a devout Catholic who died with a crucifix in his hand, according to a paper written by University of Memphis Professor King-Thom Chung, PhD, and University of Illinois Professor Deam Hunger Ferris, PhD, titled “Louis Pasteur: The True Master of Microbiology.” His remains are at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.

Pasteur won many awards, including the Grand Croix of the Legion of Honor. Institut Pasteur in Paris and Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg are named after him. Many streets are named in his honor, including Avenue Louis Pasteur near Harvard Medical School in Boston, and there is a Pasteur Institute in India that is involved in vaccine trials and rabies diagnosis.

H. Daillion (french sculptor, 1854-1937) and G. Débrié (french architect): Louis Pasteur, statue erected in 1901, Arbois, Jura, France.

Microorganisms and Spoilage

Pasteur is credited with being the first to understand and show scientifically that fermentation is caused by specific microorganisms, a discovery that also led him to the conclusion that microbes caused diseases. He showed that heat destroyed the microbes that caused spoilage in wine and beer. Pasteur and English surgeon Joseph Lister began corresponding, and Lister based his sterile surgical procedures on Pasteur’s work.