Louis Pasture

1 Pages 282 Words

Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur is seldom thought about, but his innovations are very important to all of us today. Despite this very few people know why, much less anything about him. The following paragraphs will give a brief enlightenment to his life and education, why he is important, and what makes him unique.
Louis was born in 1822. He studied at Besancon and Ecole Normale Superieure. Louis was later assigned a position at Strasbourg, Lille and Paris. In 1867 at Sorbonne he became Professor of Chemistry. Eventually he would become the first director at the Pasteur Institute. This institute was founded in 1888 and named in his honor for his research.
Louis researched and greatly extended Theodor Schwann’s researches on putrefacation. His principal work was in discovering that fermentations are essentially due to organisms. Until this time it was believed that fermentations were essentially due to spontaneous generation. He contrived essential rules for making vinegar and preventing wine disease. These rules incorporated the technique he developed called pasteurization. Pasteurization is a mild and short heat treatment that destroys pathogenic bacteria.
However Pasteurization was not his only brilliance that made him unique. In 1865 his research into silkworm disease revived the silk industry in southern France; along with splenic fever, fowl cholera, and injurious growths in beer. Louis also developed the “germ theory of disease” maintaining that disease was contagious threw the spreading of micro- organisms. He is also to thank for the anthrax vaccine our military uses today, along with several other antitoxic reagents treatments. These treatments include Diphtheria, tubercular disease, cholera, yellow fever, plague and in 1885 rabies....