Discovering Louis Pasteur: The Amazing Story of Vaccines and Pasteurization!

Raise your hand if you know this place. This is Louis Pasteur, and the research institute is named after him. So, who was he? Let's get started with all of his dedication. In Dole, Western France. In 1822, Louis Pasteur was born into a Catholic family. Unlike many geniuses worldwide, young Louis was just an average student. He loved drawing and fishing. He used to wander the streets with a paintbrush in hand. However, Louis' father was dissatisfied when he saw his son focusing only on seemingly meaningless paintings. He insisted that Louis continue to pursue an academic path. Thanks to his father's pressure, he continued to study and worked as an assistant for Professor Laurent. This laid the foundation for his love of science and research. At the age of 25, he earned his Ph.D. During this time, he was researching spontaneous generation and conducted experiments that showed no contamination. Microorganisms could not spontaneously generate. Continuing on his research journey, he was assigned by the emperor to study the fermentation process of wine. Subsequently, he discovered a remarkable phenomenon among the spoiled wine bottles. If they were heated to a temperature of 55 minus 60 degrees Celsius and then cooled down, these bottles could be reused normally. This experiment led him to a groundbreaking conclusion, bacteria destruction. Currently, this technology is widely applied to various foods, especially milk. The technology is named after him, pasteurization. In an experiment related to silkworms, Pasteur concluded that the silkworm's illness was due to germs. He isolated the infected worms in a separate room, and the result was that the disease was contained, not spreading any further. This marked the birth of the germ theory. After perfecting the theory that germs cause diseases, Pasteur sought to address a serious issue faced by farmers. In the 1870s, an outbreak of a disease in chickens known as fowl cholera. Pasteur and his colleagues cultured the bacteria responsible for fowl cholera and injected them into experimental chickens. They discovered that, if they injected live bacteria into the chickens after first injecting them with a dose of inactivated bacteria, the chickens showed no signs of illness. This laid the foundation for the creation of the first cholera vaccine. It's a twist. Germ theory also affects the life of the trash can, because trash in many places causes many germs. Trash bins were created to raise awareness of trash in one room, minimizing bacterial growth as much as possible. Lewis married Marie Laurent in 1849, the daughter of the university he was working at. They had five children, but three of them died of typhoid. He was very miserable, and at that time he was partially paralyzed. Due to a stroke, he revealed that only work makes him feel comforted and happy. Lewis's research is of great significance to the livestock industry, but it only stops at animals. At the age of 50, he began researching rabies, a disease that causes humans to suffer in a painful and terrible way. He teamed up with colleagues, believing that the causing agent resided in the brain and spinal cord, not due to curses or any magical spells. As some people believed, he cultivated the disease in rabbits and other animals, passing it down through multiple generations. The subsequent generations of the disease weakened significantly, and so the rabies vaccine was born. He then tested this vaccine on dogs, and the results were astounding. These dogs completely recovered from the disease. In 1885, he took a daring step to test this vaccine on humans for the first time. It was a 14-year-old boy bitten by a dog in more than 10 places. He was extremely anxious, losing sleep for many days, fearing that any failure would weigh heavily on his conscience. However, a miracle happened, the boy recovered. Since then, billions of doses of the rabies vaccine have been produced and used for the past 138 years, counting from Pasteur's invention of the first rabies vaccine. Three years after his successful rabies experiment, the Pasteur Institute, named after him, was inaugurated. The institute's goal was to research and test vaccines for various diseases. The institute was named after him as a resounding applause for his lifelong dedication to humanity. To this day, the Pasteur Institute has a presence in over 100 countries worldwide, and countless vaccines have originated from here. Let's give a final round of applause for the outstanding contributions of this exceptional scientist. See you in future videos honoring more scientists. Thank you and goodbye.