"Once upon a time in far off France, there lived a man named Louis Pasteur"
That is how the story that was read to me as a young child began. It was about a man named Louis Pasteur who believed in himself and believed in the existence of germs. Because he believed in himself he managed to save the life of a young boy who was bitten by a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth with white froth. Louis knew that there was an invisible enemy and eventually he found it. All because he believed in himself!
This story left a big impression on my young mind, and not just to 'believe in yourself'. It also instilled in me the realisation that not everything is as it seems - just because we can't seen something, doesn't necessarily mean it's not there. I kept hoping that this was true for fairies.
Louis Pasteur did more than find a cure for rabies. He also worked on the problem of beer and wine spoilage in France. Wine and beer went sour as it aged - was there a chemical that could prevent this? Louis was the first to show that fermentation required an organism - yeast, and was not a chemical process.
His solution to the beer and wine problem was pasteurisation. gently heating the wine or beer to a temperature of 120F [in C] to kill off any yeast left. This horrified the French wine makers and beer producers - heating wine? However, Louis proved his point in a cunningly simple experiment. heat one lot of wine and bottle it, and several months later open and compare with the wines which hadn't been heated. Of course, none of the heated bottles were off, while several of the un-heated bottles were.
Not content with guaranteeing a good wine, Louis Pasteur also disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. The general attitude in the 1860s was that life spontaneously generated out of dead matter: flies grew from dead meat, worms from decaying plants. Again, through a simple experiment, Louis proved that spontaneous generation did not occur, because life already existed - as tiny spores of organisms in the air. When deprived of these tiny organisms, meat did not spoil and flies did not rise from dead flesh!
What now? Louis Pasteur next discovered the germ, or more precisely, the 'germ theory of disease', in which diseases are spread between people by microscopic organisms which might be shared through bodily contact, sneezing etc.
This was a phenomenal discovery, though it may seem commonplace to us today. For 19th Century people, the world was suddenly occupied by a flotilla of nasty germs all waiting to do harm. For the first time the nature of infectious diseases and their method of propagation was understood. And understanding something is the first step towards solving it. It was this discovery of life in germland that allowed Pasteur to develop the cure for rabies.
The real story comes to a rather dramatic end. Joseph Meister, the boy whose life Louis Pasteur saved from rabies, became the gatekeeper at the Pasteur Institute. Fifty years after Louis saved his life he died a tragic and ironic death. When the Nazis invaded France, they asked Meister to open Louis Pasteur's crypt, out of curiosity. Rather than desecrate Louis' crypt, Joseph killed himself.
Pasteur made some shattering discoveries that changed the way we see the world. He went out on a limb by believing in something that no-one could see and was prepared to see the world through different eyes.
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