Louis Pasteur He was born on December 27, 1822, in Dôle, France, and was a renowned chemist, who achieved several advances in microbiology.
As is known, the French chemist, as a child, was not a very outstanding student, according to his teachers, his only special aptitude was painting. For this reason, the young student decided to start his career to one day be an art teacher.
In 1842, he obtained his baccalaureate degree, with a really ordinary qualification in the area of chemistry. Despite this, some time later he met the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Who did what Louis began to take an interest in the field that he himself taught. It was like this Pasteur He strove to be a prominent chemist, which years later would bring him international fame.
In 1848, he received the “French Legion of Honor“, due to the discovery of the dimorphism of tartaric acid, and 6 years later he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lille.
Later he became a chemistry professor at the Lille Nord University of France. In that same place, he became interested in the problems that the wine industry had, due to the deterioration of a large part of the production, which cost the company enormous amounts of money.
For that reason, Pasteur began with an investigation into the causes of the sour taste that infected the wine days after it was made. Thanks to the help of his microscope, he saw that within the process, two varieties of yeast were involved, which produced alcohol and lactic acid. It was for this reason that he invented a method to eliminate them, what was later called “Pasteurization“, used to degrade wine, beer and milk. This process is based on enclosing the liquid in hermetically sealed containers and increasing its temperature to 44ºC, in a short period of time.
In 1857, he was named “Director of scientific studies at the École Normale de Paris“, where 10 years later, he began to run his own laboratory.
In 1864, after carrying out several experiments, the famous French character refuted the theory of spontaneous generation, showing that every living being comes from another previous living being, which meant the beginning of modern Bacteriology.
Seven years later, at a conference, he suggested that doctors boil the instruments used for surgical interventions and even the bandages used by patients, to prevent the wounds from becoming infected. This is how he described an oven, which would later be called “Pasteur oven“, whose function is to sterilize laboratory materials.
Later, Pasteur developed several vaccines against diseases that until then were 100% deadly, such as rabies virus, chicken cholera, anthrax and erysipelas in pigs.
Another of his works that marked history was, without a doubt, the “Germ theory of infectious diseases“, where he verified that every infectious disease starts from a germ that has the ability to reproduce at alarming speeds and spread between people, which meant the beginning of scientific medicine, in which he described that each disease can be treated by means of a specific treatment. He spoke of the signs and symptoms that describe diseases in order to combat them in time. Thanks to his work, the “Golden Age of Microbiology“.
After a long life of service to humanity, Louis Pasteur died in France on September 28, 1895.