Louis Pasteur: Redefining Medicine and People's Relationship with Microorganisms

Two centuries before fast churn, the scientific revolution occurred throughout Europe. As scientists attempted to define the world through experiments and observations, people turned to science as a leading aspect of life. As the Enlightenment in Europe ended and the Industrial Revolution started, people rapidly moved to cities and populations drastically increased. Along with the populations, disease became more significant and unsanitary conditions For example, massive waves of contagious disease such as cholera and influenza spread quickly throughout Europe, causing the lives of many people. As many people died in large numbers when diseases occurred and infant death rates went up, people attempted to seek the reasons for such feared diseases that brought terror to people's lives. With many attempts to establish clean practices and management in this segment of life, it was not clear how to deal with such health issues. Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, France. Appearing right after the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Pasteur grew up with a strong patriotism for France. Pasteur's father, a tanner and decorated with the Legion of Honour during the Napoleonic Wars, may have been a major reason for his patriotic character throughout his life. In his early years, Louis Pasteur was an average student, but he was a talented drawer and painter. From his paintings displayed in the Museum of Pasteur Institute in Paris, characteristics of a well-developed talent for observation indicate his future as a scientist. Near the end of secondary school, encouraged by his headmaster, Louis headed to Paris to study. Becoming homesick, Louis returned to study at the Royal College of Besançon, where he earned a bachelor's in art and science until he was prepared to study in Paris again. When Pasteur was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure, a school that trained professors in arts and sciences, he specialized in physics and chemistry, setting a basis and discipline for his career in biology and theoretical science. As Pasteur set out to get his doctorate, he made his first major discovery. A phenomenon that puzzled chemists at the time was the behavior of polarized light passing through tartaric acid. Another scientist in France's rival country, Germany, observed that tartrate in a solution would rotate light while peritartrates would not rotate light, intriguing 26-year-old Pasteur. As Louis examined the many crystal forms, he eventually noticed that the tartrate crystals had the same orientation while the peritartrates were composed of two asymmetric crystals. But this was the beginning of Pasteur's career of redefining the biological world. After several years of teaching in Dijon-Strasbourg, Pasteur accepted a position as a professor of chemistry at the University of Lille. Aside from teaching, the Faculty of Sciences was partly established to apply science to the problems of the industries of the regions. At the time, the souring of wine and beer was a major economic problem in France. After a request from a local brewery to help solve problems related to alcohol production, Pasteur went on to apply his knowledge and reform the brewing industry. After closer research, Pasteur was able to identify that the compounds that the beer contained were optically active, meaning that fermentation was a biological process that resulted from the help of microorganisms. He suggested that the yeast cells, already known to take part in fermentation, produce the alcohol. But Pasteur observed that alcohol was not produced when there were other microbes in the solution. After taking up the position of Director of Scientific Studies at the Col-Normal Supérieur in Paris and being elected to the Academy of Sciences, he was asked by France's Ministry of Agriculture to seek a solution to the diseases devastating France's special silk industry. At that point, the silkworms almost all over the world were diseased. Taking a look at healthy and diseased silkworms, Pasteur was able to identify the disease-producing organisms. Aside from the organisms, Pasteur was able to notice how many factors such as diet, temperature, and sanitation affected the susceptibility of the worms. Before he knew it, Pasteur began investigating anthrax, a serious disease from which many cattle died. Experimenting with cows, Pasteur tried injecting two cows with a strong dose of anthrax. To Pasteur's amazement, neither of the cows developed the disease because it turned out that they had already had it. Pasteur thought that this may be a way to prevent other diseases. By producing a weakened culture of anthrax bacteria, he was able to inoculate cattle and save them. As the weak Pasteur grew more skilled, he decided to attack the dreaded disease of rabies. By experimenting with rabbits, Pasteur attempted to develop a neutralized strain of the disease. After developing a neutralized strain that he was not confident about, Pasteur was encouraged to test it on a nine-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog. After a ten-day period, the boy had survived the vaccine, and the scale of the success from the vaccine spread across the world. With a recent outbreak of cholera in Marseilles, France, Pasteur attempted to solve yet another disease. Continuing with his theory that all diseases could be related to a microorganism, Pasteur decided to take a look at smallpox. By chance-finding old chicken cholera bacteria, Pasteur discovered that their inoculation to chickens resulted in chickens that did not acquire cholera. As a result, Pasteur had once more found a solution to a widespread concerning disease. The germ theory, established after many experiments by Louis Pasteur, stated that germs attack the body from outside. Although not accepted right away, this is now the basis for many underlying diseases in the 19th century. The germ theory established the basis for the brewing of beer, winemaking, pasteurization, and antiseptic operation. Additionally, the germ theory explained the fact that if germs were the cause of fermentation, they could also be the cause of any other disease in any organism. The Pasteur effect, developed early in Louis Pasteur's career, was the observation that the removal and addition of oxygen impacted the process of fermentation, which Pasteur had discovered to depend upon microorganisms. As a result, the terms aerobic and anaerobic had been introduced into science to distinguish between organisms and their respiratory processes. Throughout Pasteur's research with many specific diseases and microbes, Pasteur was able to develop a method for killing bacteria and sterilizing different solutions. Along with the contamination resulting from imports and exports, Pasteur, at the request of the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, developed a consistent method for sterilizing products. By just heating the liquid, specifically wine and beer, Pasteur was able to sterilize the drinks and save the French industries. Spontaneous generation, a long-continuing argument in the 19th century and before, described the origin of life and explained phenomena such as fermentation as spontaneous phenomena, originating from old beliefs that life could generate spontaneously from anything. As Pasteur knew this not to be true from his recently established germ theory, he set out to disprove it. He showed that any substance that was sterilized and remained in the absence of air would not develop bacteria. This was the beginning of a new science of bacteriology and relied upon proven techniques such as sterilization. Aside from the scientific implications, the development of vaccines allowed for the application of the fact that microorganisms were responsible for many diseases, opening a possibility for the immunization of people and the saving of many lives around the world. Applying the principle of vaccination to other diseases, Pasteur was able to provide a technique for the immunization of countless people. As Louis Pasteur grew up, his foster patriotism made him a character that led the biological field in France. Being a patriot of France, Louis Pasteur was concerned with the issues of France's progress and its economy. Not only did he compete with other rival scientists in other countries, but he questioned the current beliefs of people, showing them by his progress in science how the seemingly small discoveries that he had made could save countless lives and be used to balance, understand, and research the relationship between humans and animals and the microorganisms surrounding them. Through persistence and elegant experiments, Pasteur decisively proved to the world around him the relationship between other organisms and people and how diseases truly function. He never accepted defeat and always attempted to convince everybody. His last words were, one must work, one must work, I've done what I could. Louis Pasteur's name will forever be attached to biology in the medical field. The elegancy of his clearly carried out research and the follow-up conclusions redefined the biological field, set the basis for biochemistry, and gave birth to many branches of science, such as bacteriology. Not only did Louis Pasteur redefine the relationship between humans and other organisms, but he created a new way for the world to control it. Pasteur's academic positions were numerous. His scientific accomplishments brought him France's highest decorations, including the Legion of Honor, his election to the Academy of Sciences, and an unspeakable number of other distinctions. Across the world, around 30 institutes bear his name, along with hospitals, schools, various buildings, and streets in his honor. The food eaten today and the health of people in the modern day world would not be the same as today if not for him and his persistence. Louis Pasteur, the redefinition of medicine and people's relationship with microorganisms.