Ronald Coase

Louis Pasteur , born with Pares the December 27th 1822 and died with Marnes-the-Vain the September 28th 1895, is a Scientifique French, Chimiste and Physicien of formation, and a pioneer of the Microbiologie.

Biography

Louis Pasteur was born in 1822 with Dole, small town of the Jura. His/her father, after having been sergeant in the Napoleonean army, took again the family profession of tanner. In 1825 the free family Pares for Marnoz, for finally settling in Arbois in 1830. The Pasteur young person follows to Arbois the courses of mutual teaching then enters to the College of the city. It is at that time that it is made known for its talents of painter; he made besides many portraits of members of his family and inhabitants of the small town. In October 1838, it leaves Arbois for the Institution Barbet spaniel in Paris in order to prepare with the baccalaureat then with the contests. However, depressed by this new life, it gives up this idea, leaves Paris and finishes its school year 1838-1839 with the College of Alpine laburnum. With the re-entry 1839, it continues its studies with the royal college of Franche-Comté, with Besancon. In 1840, it obtains the arts Baccalauréat and then, in 1842, after a failure, the science Baccalaureat mathematics. Pasteur goes back again to Paris and is finally allowed at the National university in 1843. He studies there the Chimie and the Physique, as well as the Cristallographie. Besides he supports two theses (as that was done usually at the time) in 1847, chemistry and physics. Its work on the molecular Chiralité will be worth the to him Médaille Rumford in 1856.

After having been professor with Dijon then with Strasbourg of 1848 to 1853, it marries there Marie Laurent, girl of the vice-chancellor of Academy. Pasteur is then named professor and senior of the Faculty of Science of Lille lately created.

In 1857 it is named administrator in charge of the direction of the studies at the National university, street of Ulm, in Paris. In 1862, he is elected with the Academy of Science to replace Henri Hureau de Senarmont.

At the National university, Pasteur is considered to be authoritative as well by his colleagues as by the pupils and encounters many disputes. In 1867, in connection with a debate with the senate, eighty pupils of the School send a " adresse" with Holy-Beuve to support it in its combat in favor of the freedom of the bookstore. Two of them having, contrary to the payment of the School, makes publish this " adresse" in the press, Pasteur, with the agreement of the Minister for the State education, Victor Duruy, takes disciplinary measures against which pupils express in block. The political opposition and the liberal press attack Pasteur and Duruy, Duruy reconsiders measurements against the students, the resignation of Pasteur as administrator of the National university is accepted; he receives a pulpit in Sorbonne and one creates, at the Teacher training school even, a physiological chemistry laboratory whose direction is entrusted to him.

The defeat of 1870 and the fall of Napoleon III are a blow terrible for Pasteur, large patriotic and very attached to the imperial dynasty. In addition, it is sick. The National Assembly votes a reward to him to thank it for its work whose economic consequences are considerable.

In 1874, its research on the Fermentation is worth the Médaille Copley to him, decreed by the Royal Society , of London.

In 1876, Pasteur presents himself to the elections senate oriales, but it is a failure. His/her friends believe that it finally will stop and enjoy its retirement, but it takes again its research and concludes its studies on fermentation from the Bière by the publication of a book: Studies on the beer (1876).

In 1885, Pasteur refused to present his candidature for the legislative elections, whereas the peasants of the Beauce, of which it had saved the herds thanks to the vaccine against the coal, would undoubtedly have carried it to the House of Commons.

The discovery of the anti-rabic vaccine (1885) will be worth in Pasteur his dedication in the world: it will receive many distinctions.

He dies on September 28th, 1895. The French would have liked that it was buried with the the Pantheon of Paris; finally its family decided to bury it in a crypt of the Pasteur Institute.

Whether it is scientific community, or the whole of the population: “Pasteur still profits from a universal recognition”.

On the religious feelings allotted to Pasteur, his grandson Pasteur Vallery-Radot made this development: “My father always had care, and my mother also besides, to say that Pasteur was not practitioner. If you open the Vie of Pasteur , you will see that my father speaks about the spiritualism and not about the Catholicism of Pasteur. I remember perfectly the irritation of my father and my mother, when some priest, in pulpit, allowed himself to allot this sentence to him that it forever known as: " I have the Breton blind and simple faith. " (...) All the literature which was written on the alleged Catholicism of Pasteur is absolutely false. ”

The work of Louis Pasteur

Work on the chirality of the molecules

In work that Pasteur realized at the beginning of his scientific career as a chemist, it solved in 1849 a problem which was going thereafter to appear of major importance in the development of the contemporary Chimie: the separation of the two forms of the tartaric Acid . A solution of this compound obtained starting from living organisms (specifically in the binds obtained at the time of the Vinification) turned the plan of the polarized Lumière crossing it, whereas a solution of this compound obtained by the chemical synthesis did not cause this effect although both made up have same the rough Formule. By examining the tartrate crystals (combined Base of the tartaric acid) of Sodium and Ammonium, Pasteur noticed that the two crystal shapes, image one of the other in a mirror coexisted in the sample. He separated the crystals manually and observed an effect of rotation of the plan of polarization of the light, in a direction opposed for the two types of crystals. Pasteur had the intuition to think that the molecule in question could exist in two asymmetrical forms highlighting for the first time the chirality of the molecules.

Work of Pasteur in this field succeeded, a few years later with the birth of the field of the Stéréochimie with the publication of the work the Chimie in Space by van “T Hoff which, by introducing the concept of asymmetry of the carbon atom largely contributed to the rise of the Organic chemistry modern.

(Gerald L. Geison, examining the private books of Pasteur, notes at his place a tendency to attenuate its debt towards Auguste Laurent.)

Spontaneous generation

Starting from 1859, Pasteur carries out a fight against the partisans of the “spontaneous Generation”, in particular against Felix-Archimedes Pouchet and a young journalist, Georges Clémenceau; this last, doctor, blame competences of Pasteur, who is not it, and allot his refusal of the spontaneous generation to an ideological bias (Pasteur is Christian). And it was finally after six years of research that it showed the falseness of this old theory, according to which “the life could appear from nothing, and the spontaneously generated microbes being”.

Precise questions

December 20th, 1858, the Academy of Science takes note of two notes where Pouchet, naturalist and doctor rouennais, a final proof of the spontaneous Generation claims to bring.
Since the eighteenth century, partisans and adversaries of this theory seek to carry out decisive experiments in support of their opinion.
The partisans of the spontaneous generation (sponteparists, heterogenists) support that when the contact with the air reveals on certain substances of the microscopic living beings, this life holds its origin not of a preexistent life but of a capacity genesic of the air.
For the adversaries of the spontaneous generation, the air brings the life on these substances not by a genesic property but because it conveys germs of beings vivants.
In 1837, already, Schwann made an experiment which the adversaries of the spontaneous generation regard as convincing in favor of their thesis: it showed that if the air is heated (then cooled) before being able to exert its influence, the life does not appear.

At the time of the communication of Pouchet, there remain however two weak points in the position of the adversaries of the spontaneous generation:
1° under certain conditions, they obtain, without being able to explain it, of the results apparently favorable to the spontaneous generation;
2° the processes (heating, washing with the sulphuric acid, filtering) by which they remove the air from the germs that it could convey are shown by the sponteparists of " tourmenter" air and to deprive it of its capacity genesic.

January 3rd, 1859, the Academy of Science discusses the note of Pouchet. All the academicians who take part in this discussion: Milne Edwards, Payen, Quatrefages, Claude Bernard and Dumas, pleading experiments which they made themselves, are expressed against the spontaneous generation, which, moreover, then became doctrines minoritaire.

Pouchet counteracts. “Nobody”, tells Pasteur, “could not indicate the true cause of error of its experiments, and soon the Academy, including/understanding all that still remained to be made, proposes for subject of price the following question: To test, by experiments well done, to throw one day new on the question of the spontaneous generations . ” It is Pasteur who obtained the price, for his Mémoire on the organized corpuscles which exist in the atmosphere. Examination of the doctrines of the spontaneous generations. (1861).

Jean Rostand thus recapitulates what Pasteur, in this Memory, brought from nine compared to the many scientists who had fought before him the theory of the spontaneous generation:
“Spallanzani having shown that, contrary to the assertion of Needham, the micro-organisms are not born in infusions heated in isolation,
1° Schwann shows that the heated infusions do not give rise to micro-organisms, even when one provides them air, provided that this one were brought up to a high temperature;
2° Pasteur shows that the heated infusions do not give rise to micro-organisms, even when one provides them natural air, provided that this one were removed mechanically from its germs;
3° Pasteur, finally, watch that organic mediums, even not heated , do not give rise to micro-organisms provided that one provides them an air removed from germs by the heating. ”

Average mechanics (without heating) to remove the air from its germs, of which it is question at the point 2°, consists in providing a bottle with a collar in S (swan neck): in an appreciable number of cases, the air which crossed the sinuosities does not cause the appearance of living beings at the bottom of the bottle whereas it causes it on a drop placed at the entry of the circuit. “This beautiful experiment had been suggested in Pasteur by the Balard chemist; Chevreul, on its side, had made analogues of them. ”

Another element of the contribution of Pasteur was a fertile criticism of work of its predecessors. Thus, it understood that certain results, apparently favorable to the spontaneous generation, announced even by Schwann (of which other experiments were regarded as refuting the spontaneous generation), were due so that one used the mercury tank to prevent the penetration of the ambient air: mercury, quite simply, is itself very dirty.

(Note: the Pasteur-Pouchet controversy is also approached in the scientific article Controverse.)

Fermentation

From 1857 to 1867, Pasteur studies the fermentation of the wine and the Levure S.C. Galey, J. Potus and J. Adrian write a little schematically: “The scientific knowledge of yeast was established at the XIXe century by Cagniard de Latour which discovers its alive nature, by Payen which establishes its chemical composition and Pasteur who describes his metabolism. ” Makes some, it is Adamo Fabbroni which, in 1787, in its Ragionamento sull' arte di far vino (Florence), supported the first that fermentation of the wine is produced by an alive substance present in must.

Anaerobic digestion and the “Pasteur effect”.

During his work on fermentations, Pasteur discovers a fact hitherto unsuspected: the possibility of certain organizations of living in the absence of free oxygen (i.e. in the absence of air), by borrowing oxygen necessary to made up bodies. It calls these anaerobic organizations . (The words aerobic and anaerobic are of him.)
Thus, in the case of alcoholic fermentation, the yeast held safe from the air lives by causing at the expense of sugar a chemical reaction which releases the oxygen which it needs and causes at the same time the appearance of alcohol. On the other hand, if the yeast is in the presence of free oxygen, it develops easily using this oxygen and the producing fermentation of alcohol is faible.
These contrary alcohol and yeast yields are a particular case of what is called now “the Pasteur effect”.

Discusses on the exact role of the alive agents in fermentation

Berzélius and Liebig (Liebig in a more moderate way) had had a purely catalytic design of the fermentation, which excluded the role from living organisms, and they had fought work of Cagniard de Latour, which, in 1836 and 1838, had shown that the brewers' yeast was a micro-organism. Pasteur “has a first orientation given by Cagniard de Latour; he develops it and shows that it is as an living being that the yeast acts, and not as an organic matter in decomposition. ”

However, certain facts (“diastase” prepared in 1833 by Payen and Persoz…) went in the direction of the catalytic design of Liebig and, in 1860, Marcellin Berthelot, in a note with the Academy of Science, proposed a synthesis between this design and that of Cagniard de Latour: fermentation is not produced directly by the living beings which of it are responsible usually (yeasts etc) but by nonalive substances, “soluble leavens” (one will say “zymases later”, then “enzymes”), substances themselves produced by the living beings in question.

One agrees to think that Pasteur was unable to include/understand these facts (devoted since by work of Eduard Buchner), even when a posthumous publication of Claude Bernard affirmed them. One puts this error of Pasteur on the account of his vitalism, which also prevented it including/understanding the role of toxins and from admitting in 1881, at the time of his competition with All Saints' day in the race at the vaccine against the coal, which a “killed” vaccine could be effective. Work of Pasteur on fermentation was, in the years 1970 and 1980, in the middle of a debate between theorists “internalists” and “externalists” of sciences.

Diseases of the wine and pasteurization

In 1863, it has been already a few years that the diseases of the French wines burden the trade heavily. Napoleon III request in Pasteur, specialist in fermentation and the putrefaction, to seek a remedy. Pasteur proposes to heat the wine with 57°C in order to kill the germs and thus solves the problem of his conservation and of transport, it is the Pasteurization. It has about this process a quarrel of priority with the oenologist Alfred de Vergnette de Lamotte, in whom the scientists Balard and Thenard respectively take party for Pasteur and Vergnette.

Fermentation with the contagious diseases

The theory of the microbial origin of the contagious diseases existed for a long time with the state of assumption when, in 1835, Agostino Bassi proved it for the first time in a book on the muscardine, one of the diseases of the worm with soie.
Before Pasteur, therefore, one knew the existence of the microbes, and the germes.
Work of Pasteur on fermentation, however, stimulated the development of the microbial theory of the contagious diseases. Davaine, at the beginning of its publications of 1863, which are now regarded as the first proof of the microbial origin of one communicable disease to the man, wrote “Mr. Pasteur, in February 1861, published his remarkable work on the butyric leaven, close which consists of small cylindrical rods, having all the characters of the vibrios or the bacteria. The thread-like corpuscles that I had seen in the blood of the sheep reached of blood of spleen coal having a great analogy of form with these vibrios, I was brought to examine similar corpuscles whether or same kind as those which determine butyric fermentation, introduced into the blood of an animal, would not play there in the same way the part of a leaven. ”.
Pasteur himself, in 1880, recalls his work on fermentations and adds: “Human medicine, like the veterinary medicine, seized the light that these new results brought to them. One in particular hastened to seek if the viruses and the contages would not be animated beings. Doctor Davaine (1863) endeavoured to highlight the functions of the bactéridie coal, which he had seen as of the year 1850. ”

Fermentation with surgical pathology: antisepsy and asepsis

The English surgeon Joseph To list, after having read work of Pasteur on fermentation (where the putrefaction is explained, like fermentation, by the action of living organisms), is convinced that the postoperative infection (readily described at the time like a rot, a putrefaction) is due it also at microscopic organizations. Having read elsewhere than phenol (phenol) destroyed the entérozoaires which infected certain cattle, it washes the wounds of its operated with carbolic water and their bracket a cotton soaked with phenol. The result is a drastic reduction of the infection and mortalité.
To list publishes its theory and its method in 1867, by explicitly attaching them to work of Pasteur. In a letter of 1874, he thanks Pasteur “, by your brilliant research, to have shown me the truth of the theory of the germs of putrefaction, and to have thus given me the only principle which could complete the system disinfectant. ”
The antisepsy listérienne, whose effectiveness will triumph in a few years over resistances over delayed, is, from the theoretical point of view, an important branch of the microbial theory. On the practical level, however, it is not entirely satisfactory: To list, which thought only of the germs present in the air, and not with those which the hands of the operators and the instruments and the fabrics propagate that they employ, attacks the microbes in the operative field, by vaporizing phenol in the air and while applying some to the wounds. It is rather not very effective when it is necessary to operate in-depth and, moreover, the phenol has a caustic effect on the operator and the patient. One thus seeks soon to prevent the infection (asepsis) rather than to fight it (antisepsy).
Pasteur “is those which seek to exceed the antisepsy by the asepsis. ” With the meeting of April 30th, 1878 of the Academy of medicine, it draws the attention to the germs propagated by water, sponge or the charpie with which the surgeons wash or recover the wounds and recommends to them to make use only of instruments of a perfect cleanliness, to be cleaned the hands then to subject them to a fast buckling, to employ only charpie, strips and sponges beforehand exposed to the temperature from 130 to 150 degrees and water which would have undergone the temperature from 110 to 120 degrees. The germs suspended in the air around the bed of the patient being much fewer than in the water and on the surface of the objects, these precautions would make it possible to use a phenol diluted enough not to be caustique.
Certe, these recommendations were not absolute innovation: Semmelweis and others before him (for example Jacques Mathieu Delpech) had already understood that the authors of the medical acts could themselves transmit the infection, and they had made recommendations consequently, but progress of the microbial theory had so much changed the data which the councils of Pasteur accepted much more audience than those of its predecessors.
By thus recommending the asepsis, Pasteur traced a way which would be followed by Ernst von Bergmann and William S. Halsted .

Bacterium of the worms with silk

Such is the version of Pasteur and his admirors. According to other authors, Antoine Béchamp, which studied the pébrine at the same time as Pasteur, affirmed from the start the innovation of this disease and its parasitic nature, right ideas that Pasteur fought a long time with violence. As for the means that Pasteur advised to fight against the disease, most reasonable had been proposed before him and did not stop in any event the decline of sericiculture française.
At all events, work of Pasteur on the diseases of the worms with silk does not lend itself to an easy illustration genius of their author. Thus, André Pichot chose not to make them appear in his anthology of writings of Pasteur because “It is very difficult to extract some from the significant passages”.

The vaccine against the cholera of hens

As from 1876, he works successively on the filter and the autoclave developped at the point by Charles Chamberland (1851-1908) and also on the buckling of the vases.
Following the studies of Robert Koch, Pasteur discovers the Staphylocoque. During six years, the French and the German study the diseases and their microbes.
During the summer 1879, Pasteur and his collaborators, Red-headed Emile and Emile Duclaux, discover that the hens to which one inoculated out-of-date cultures of the microbe of the Choléra of the hens not only do not die but resist new infections - it is the discovery of a vaccine of a new type: contrary to what was the case in vaccination against variola, one is not useful oneself, like vaccine, of a benign virus provided by the nature (in the form of a minor illness which immunizes against the grave disease) but one artificially causes the attenuation of a very virulent stock initially and it is the result of this attenuation which is used as vaccine.
If it is necessary to believe of it the famous version of Rene Vallery-Radot and Emile Duclaux, it is by taking again old forgotten cultures (or left side during the holidays) that one would have realized with surprise that they did not even kill and immunized. There would be a case of Sérendipité.
A. Cadeddu, however, recalls that “since the years 1877-1878, had perfectly the concept of attenuation of virulence”. It is one of the reasons for which Cadeddu, following Mirko D. Grmek, questions the pled role of the chance in the discovery of the process of attenuation of virulence and thinks that this attenuation was surely actively required, which the notes of laboratory of Pasteur seem well to confirm.

In his double communication of October 26th, 1880 to the Academy of Science and the Academy of medicine, Pasteur allots the attenuation of virulence to the contact with oxygen. He says that cultures that one lets age in contact with oxygen lose of their virulence at the point to be able to be used as vaccine, whereas cultures which one lets age in tubes safe from oxygen keep their virulence. He recognizes however in a footnote which oxygen always does not play its role of attenuation, or not always within the same times: “Since, safe from the air, the attenuation does not take place, it is conceived that, so in a culture with the free contact of the air (pure) it is made a deposit of the parasite in some thickness, the deep layers are safe from the air, while the surface ones are under very other conditions. This only circumstance, jonte with the intensity of virulence, whatever, so to speak, the quantity of the virus employed, makes it possible to understand that the attenuation of a virus should not necessarily vary proportionally at the duration to the air. ”
PH. Decourt made this comment: “Under these conditions, it is impossible to speak about a process of vaccination. One is obliged to note that at the end of October 1880, Pasteur does not have any yet of it. ”
One reads in a publication Internet of the Department states-unien of agriculture dated January 14th, 2005:
“Pasteur worked on a vaccine against the cholera of hens, but without much success. Since Pasteur, there were several attempts to produce an effective vaccine against the cholera of hens. A substantial but nonabsolute immunity can be conferred on the poultry, under controlled conditions, using killed vaccines of Pasteurella multocida. ”

The vaccine against the disease of coal

The May 5th 1881, during the famous experiment of Pouilly-le-Fort, a herd of sheep is vaccinated against the disease of coal using a vaccine developped at the point by Pasteur and his assistants. This experiment was a success complet.
Certain authors reproach Pasteur for having induced the scientific public in error on the true nature of the vaccine used. This question is the subject of an article with share, the " Secret of Pouilly-le-Fort ".

The rage

Pasteur being often shown, in particular on Internet, to have usurped a share of glory which returned to its precursors, one will give here a table of the results on the rage to which one had arrived before his entry in scène.
In 1879, Paul-Henri Duboué releases from various work of the time a “nervous theory” of the rage: “On this assumption, the rabic virus sticks to the nervous fibrillae exposed by the bite and is propagated to the bulb”. The big role (but nonexclusive) of the nervous way in the transmission of the rabies virus was confirmed later in experiments by Pasteur and his assistants.
The same year 1879, Galtier watch which one can use the rabbit, much less dangerous than the dog, like animal of experimentation. It as plans to make profitable the long life of incubation (i.e. long life as the virus puts to reach the nerve centres) to make play preventive means (that it is still to seek or test) a curative role: “I undertook experiments in order to seek an agent able to neutralize the rabic virus after it was absorbed and to prevent thus the appearance of the disease especially, because, being persuaded, according to my research necroscopic, that the once declared rage is and will remain a long time, if not always incurable, because of the lesions which it determines in the nerve centres, I thought that the discovery of an effective preventive means would almost be equivalent to discovered of a curative treatment, if its action were really effective a day or two after the bite, after the inoculation of the virus”. ” (It will be noted that Galtier does not specify only the preventive means to which it thinks must be a vaccine.)
In a note of 1881, it announces in particular that it seems to have conferred immunity on a sheep by injecting dribble of dog to him mad by blood way. (Effectiveness of this method of immunization of the small ruminants: goat and sheep, by intravenous injection will be confirmed in 1888 by two Pasteurian, Nocard and Roux.)
In this same note, however, Galtier repeats an error which it had already made in its Traité contagious diseases of 1880: because it could not transmit the disease by inoculation of fragments of nerves, marrow or brain, it believes capacity to conclude that, in the dog, the virus has its seat only in lingual glands and the mucous membrane bucco-pharyngienne.
The things are there when Pasteur, in 1881, begins his publications on the Rage.
In a note of May 30th of this year, he recalls the “nervous theory” of Duboué and the incapacity where Galtier said to be to confirm this theory by inoculating cerebral substance or marrow of mad dog. “I have satisfaction to announce with this Academy that our experiments were happier”, known as Pasteur, and in this note of two pages, it establishes two important facts:
1° the rabic virus does not sit solely in saliva, but also, and with an at least equal virulence, in the brain;
2° the direct inoculation of rabic substance cerebral on the surface of the brain of the dog by trepanation undoubtedly communicates the rage, with an incubation definitely shorter (death in less than three weeks) that in the ordinary circumstances, which saves an invaluable time with the expérimentateurs.
In this note of 1881, Galtier is named only once, and it is to be contradicted (with reason).
In December 1882, news notes of Pasteur and his collaborators, establishing that the central nervous system is the principal seat of the virus, where one finds it in a state purer than in saliva, and announcing cases of immunization of animals per inoculation of the virus, in other words cases of vaccination. Galtier is named twice at the foot of the page, first of all in connection with the insurmountable difficulties facing the study of the rage before the intervention of Pasteur, in particular because “saliva was the only matter where one had noted the presence of the rabic virus” (follows a reference to Galtier) and then in connection with the absence of immunization that the Pasteurian ones noted in the dog after intravenous injection: “These results contradict those which were announced by Mr. Galtier, with this Academy, on August 1st, 1881, by experiments made on the sheep. ” Galtier, in 1891 then in 1904, was shown ulcerated this criticism against its method of immunization of the small ruminants by intravenous injection, whose effectiveness was confirmed in 1888 by two Pasteurian, Roux and Nocard.

Two notes of February and May 1884 are devoted to methods of modification of the degree of virulence by successive passages to the animal (exaltation by successive passages to rabbits, attenuation by successive passages to the monkeys). The authors think that after a certain number of passages in animals of the same species, one obtains a fixed virus, i.e. a virus whose properties will remain immutable at the time of subsequent passages. (In 1935, P. Lépine showed that this fixity was absolute than it was believed and than it was necessary to control the degree of virulence and the immunogenic capacity of the “fixed” stocks.)

In 1885, Pasteur known as able to obtain a form of the virus attenuated at will by exposing marrow of rabbit rabic in contact with the dry kept air. That makes it possible to vaccinate by a series of increasingly virulent inoculations.

It is in this year 1885 qu ' it carries out its first tests on the homme.
It did not publish anything on the first two cases (Girard and the Poughon young girl), which, according to Patrice Debré, feeds a rumor regularly according to which Pasteur “would have choked” his first failures. In fact, in the case Girard, which seem to have evolved/moved favorably, the diagnosis of rage, in spite of symptoms which had made conclude with a declared rage, was doubtful, and, in the case of the young girl Poughon (which died the shortly after vaccination), it was most probably about a rage declared, which was and is still always a death warrant shortly, with or without vaccination.

The July 6th 1885, one brings to Pasteur a small Alsatian shepherd of Steige nine years old, Joseph Meister, bitten the two days before by a dog which had then bitten its owner. The bite being recent, there is no declared rage. This uncertainty of the diagnosis makes the case more delicate than the precedents and Roux, the assistant of Pasteur in research on the rage, formally refuses to take part in the injection. Pasteur hesitates, but two eminent doctors, Alfred Vulpian and Joseph Grancher, estimate that the case is sufficiently serious to justify vaccination and make it practice under their responsibility. Joseph Meister receives thirteen inoculations distributed over ten days. It will never develop the rage.

The very famous case of Meister is not perhaps any more very convincing. What made consider that the dog which had bitten it was mad is the fact that “this one with the autopsy, had hay, straw and fragments of wood in the stomach”. No inoculation of substance taken on the dog was made. Peter, main adversary of Pasteur and large clinician, knew that the diagnosis of rage by the presence of foreign bodies in the stomach was null and void. He pointed out it with the Academy of medicine (January 11th, 1887).

A detail of the treatment of Meister illustrates these words written in 1966 per Maxime Schwartz, then managing director of the Institute Pasteur (Paris): “Pasteur is not perceived today as one century ago or even twenty years ago. The time of the hagiographies is completed, the images of Épinal make smile, and the conditions in which were tried out the vaccine against the rage or the anti-diphtheric serotherapy would make retrospectively quiver our modern ethics committees. ”

Pasteur, indeed, made make in Meister, after the series of the vaccine inoculations, an injection of control. The injection of control, to say it crûment, consists in trying to kill the subject by injecting a stock of a virulence to him which would be fatal for him if it would not be vaccinated or would be it badly; if he escapes from it, it is concluded that the vaccine is efficace.
Pasteur said itself the things clearly: “Joseph Meister thus has escaped, not only with the rage which its bites could have developed, but with that which I inoculated to him for control of immunity due to the treatment, rage more virulent than that of the rues.
The very virulent final inoculation still has the advantage of limiting the duration of the apprehensions which one can have on the continuations of the bites. If the rage could burst, she would declare herself more quickly by a virus more virulent than by that of the bites. ”
In connection with the second of these three sentences, Andre Pichot, in his anthology of writings of Pasteur, puts a note: “This sentence is moved a little, insofar as it were a question here of looking after an human being (and not to make an experiment on an animal). ”

Pasteur having published his first successes, his vaccine anti-rabic quickly becomes famous and the candidates tributary. Disappointed by some cases where the vaccine was ineffective, Pasteur believes capacity to pass to a “intensive treatment”, which it presents to the Academy of Science on November 2nd, 1886. The child Jules Rouyer, vaccinated in October preceding this communication, dies twenty-four days after the communication and his/her father carries felt sorry for against the persons in charge of the vaccination
According to an account makes about fifty years after the events by the bacteriologist André Loir, nephew and former assistant-preparer of Pasteur, the medulla of the child, inoculated with rabbits, communicates the rage, but Roux to them (in the absence of Pasteur, which holiday in Riviera) submitted a report/ratio in contrary direction; the medical examiner, Brouardel, after having said to Roux “If I do not give an opinion in your favor, it is fifty years an immediate retreat in the evolution of science, it is necessary to avoid that! ”, concludes in its expertise that the Rouyer child did not die of the rage. P. Debré accepts this account, while noting that it rests only on Loir.

At the same time, the Réveillac young person, who underwent the intensive treatment, dies by presenting atypical symptoms where Peter, the large adversary of Pasteur, sees a human rage with symptoms of rabbit rage, in other words the “rage of laboratory”, the “Pasteur rage”, which one starts with much speaking.

“One renonça later with a method of so energetic treatment, and which could present some dangers. ”

In fact, one ends even up giving up the ordinary treatment of Pasteur-Roux.
In 1908, Fermi proposed a vaccine against the rage with virus treated with phenol. Gradually, in the whole world, the carbolic vaccine of Fermi supplanted rabbit marrows of Pasteur and Roux. In France, where one had remained about it with rabbit marrows, P. Lépine and V. Sautter made into 1937 rigorous comparisons: a version of the carbolic vaccine protected rabbits in the proportion from 77,7%, whereas the rabbits vaccinated by the method of desiccated marrows were protected only in the proportion from 35%. In a work of 1973, André Gamet announces that the preparation of vaccine against the rage by the method of desiccated marrows is not used any more. Among the methods which are it still, it quotes the treatment of the virus by phenol.

The Academy of Science proposes the creation of an establishment intended to treat the rage: the Institut Pasteur is born in 1888.

Genius of Pasteur: ordering rather than innovation

André Pichot as follows defines the essential character of the work of Pasteur: “It is there the key word of its work: those always consisted in putting order, on some level that it is. They comprise relatively little original elements (In note: That can surprise, but the studies on molecular dissymmetry were already quite advanced when Pasteur was interested in it, those on fermentations also; the experiments on the spontaneous generation are the refinement of work whose principle was old of more than one century; the presence of germs in the infectious illness studied by Pasteur was often highlighted by others that him; as for vaccination, she had been invented by Jenner at the end of the XVIIIe century, and the idea of a prevention using the principle of not-repetition of certain diseases had been proposed well before Pasteur did not carry it out.); but, generally, they start from a very confused situation, and the genius of Pasteur always was to find, in this initial confusion, a discussion thread which it followed with constancy, patience and application. ”

Patrice Debré known as in the same way: “Pasteur gives sometimes even the impression to be satisfied to check results described by others, then to adapt them. However, it is precisely when it takes again left demonstrations, so to speak, in fallow, that it is shown most innovative: the characteristic of its genius, it is its spirit of synthesis. ”

Pasteur, a scientist in the world

Pasteur was of nothing a researcher isolated in his ivory tower. Its work was directed towards the medical applications, hygienic, agricultural and industrial. He always narrowly collaborated with the professions concerned (even if, among the doctors, its partisans were in minority) and he knew to obtain the support of the public authorities for the scientific research. “It is undoubtedly with that Pasteur owes his great popularity. He has itself knowingly contributed to the construction of his legend, by his texts and his public interventions. ”

Complexity of an historical figure

For a few years, the historians of sciences have endeavoured to reveal the complexity of a historical character hidden by his own myth. This work also makes it possible to put at the day the complexity of the exchanges and the influences which took part in the production of the Pasteurian innovations, which are never the fruits of the action isolated from a " hero of the science".

G.L. Geison and A. Cadeddu, by studying the notes of laboratory of Pasteur, noted that they cancel sometimes his public statements. The most painful case is the experiment of Pouilly-le-Fort, of which it was already question.

H. Hakes and T. Pinch, in 1993 show Pasteur, in the controversy on the spontaneous generation, neglecting the results which do not go in the direction of its thesis. They do not blame it besides: “Pasteur knew what was to be regarded as a result and what owed the being like a " erreur" ” (p. 125).

However let us announce, in connection with this a little cynical description, that voices protested against the tendency of certain theorists " externalistes" or " sociologistes" sciences to reduce the scientific activity, and in particular that of Pasteur, with operations and takeovers by force where rationality would have relatively little share

Other times, another saint

To a certain time, the apologetic catholic readily allotted to Pasteur the sentence " I have the Breton blind and simple faith " , sentence that Pasteur, who had kept of his catholic education only one spiritualism without religious practice, never pronounced.

In 2004, Pasteur is used as moral guarantee with a cause of a different nature: its precedent is evoked at the National Assembly in favor of the compassionnelle euthanasia. The commission pays, according to Leon Daudet, that some of the nineteen neat Russians of the rage by Pasteur developed the disease and that, to save the atrocious sufferings to them which had been declared and which would in any event have been followed of an unquestionable death, one practiced on them the euthanasia with the assent of Pasteur.

However, it one time ago when Pasteur expert of the euthanasia was not a thing which one exhibait readily: Axel Munthe also having told him the euthanasia of some of bitten Russian in the English original of sound Book of San Michele , the French translation published in 1934 per Albin Michel, although given like “full text”, was cut down by the passage correspondant.

The heritage of Pasteur

Today, the Pasteurian doctrines are always quite present.

The Pasteurian heritage also takes the form of the network of the Pasteur institutes.

Homages

There exist 2.020 streets “Pasteur” in France. It is one of the proper names most allotted like street name. At the time of the great movements of Décolonisation, which involved renamings of street, the Pasteur streets often kept their name.

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