LOUIS PASTEUR

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur
(December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole.
Pasteur is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of disease. His discoveries reduced death from fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology. ^[2] His body lies beneath the Institute Pasteur in Paris in a spectacular vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.^[3]

Pasteur demonstrated that fermentation is caused by the growth of micro-organisms, and that the growth of bacterium in nutrient broths is not due to spontaneous generation^[2] but rather to biogenesis.  He exposed boiled broths to air in vessels that contained a filter to prevent all particles from passing through to the growth medium, and even in vessels with no filter at all, with air coming in through a long bent tube that would not allow dust particles to pass. Nothing grew in the broths unless the flasks were broken open; therefore, the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than spontaneously generated within the broth. This was one of the last and most important experiments disproving the theory of spontaneous generation. ^[2]

References

1.  Asimov, Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology 2nd Revised edition

2.  James J. Walsh (1913). "Louis Pasteur". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Louis_Pasteur.