Louis Pasteur Biography

Louis Pasteur was the one who found that microbes were too responsible for sour alcohol and devised the pasteurisation technique, which kills bacteria by heating the beverages and then allowing them to cool. In addition, his germ theory work led him and his team to develop vaccines for rabies and anthrax.

Louis Pasteur Biography

Let us look at the Louis Pasteur Biography or the Pasteur biography in detail.

Early Life

To start Pasteur biography or the Louis Pasteur short biography from his early life, Louis Pasteur was born on Dec 27, 1822, in Dole, which is located in the Jura region of France. His father, named “Jean-Joseph Pasteur,” was a tanner, sergeant major who received the Legion of Honor during the Napoleonic Wars, and he grew up in Arbois. He is an average student and was skilled at painting and drawing. He received a bachelor's degree in art (in 1840). Following that, he also got another bachelor's degree in science (in 1842) from the Royal College of Besançon, as well as a doctorate (in 1847) from the École Normale in Paris.

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Pasteur has spent many years teaching and researching at Dijon Lycée. In 1848, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met the rector's daughter, Marie Laurent. They got married on May 29, 1849, and were gifted with five children, though only two survived their childhood. This is the Louis Pasteur short biography or the Louis Pasteur biography book.

First Major Contribution in Chemistry

Pasteur was seeking to address the dilemma of the nature of tartaric acid, a chemical found in the sediments of fermenting wine, in 1849. Many Scientists were using polarized light rotation as a studying crystal means. When polarized light is passed via a dissolved tartaric acid solution, the plane angle of light is rotated. Pasteur discovered that the other chemical found in wine sediments, known as paratartaric acid, had a similar composition to tartaric acid.

The majority of the scientists assumed that the two chemicals were the same. However, Pasteur noticed that the paratartaric acid did not rotate the plane-polarized light. He summarized that although the two compounds hold similar chemical compositions, somehow, they must have varied structures.

Pasteur used a microscope to examine the paratartaric acid and discovered two different sorts of small crystals. Though they looked mostly identical, the two actually were mirror images of themselves. He separated those two types of crystals into two piles and has made solutions for each. Whenever the polarized light passed through each, he discovered that both the solutions rotated - in the opposite directions. In the solution, when the two crystals were together, the effect of polarized light was cancelled. This specific experiment established that simply studying the composition is not enough to understand how the chemical behaves. The shape and structure are also important factors and led to the stereochemistry field. You can also find more information from Louis Pasteur biography or the Louis Pasteur autobiography book.

Commercial Achievements

Pasteur was appointed dean of the scientific faculty and professor of chemistry at the University of Lille in 1854. He worked at that university to find solutions to the challenges associated with the production of alcoholic beverages. Working on the germ hypothesis, which Pasteur did not originate but developed via experiments and finally persuaded most of Europe of its validity, he established that some species, such as bacteria, were responsible for sour beer, wine, and even milk.

Then, he invented a process where bacteria could be removed by boiling, followed by cooling the liquid. He completed the first test on it on Apr 20, 1862, and today, the process is referred to as pasteurization.

In 1865, shifting his focus, Pasteur helped to save the silk industry. He also demonstrated that microorganisms were targeting healthy silkworm eggs and producing an unknown disease and that the sickness would be eradicated if the germs were eradicated. He eventually discovered a method to prevent contamination in them, which was quickly adopted by silk producers all around the world.

Pasteur made his first vaccine breakthrough in 1879, with a condition known as chicken cholera. He proved that after mistakenly exposing the hens to an attenuated cultural form, they grew resistant to the actually accessible virus. Pasteur then went on to extend his germ theory to develop the causes with respective vaccinations for diseases such as cholera, TB, anthrax and smallpox.

In the year 1873, Pasteur was elected as an Académie de Médecine’s associate member. He decided to focus his attention on the rabies problem in 1882, the year he was elected to the Académie Française. Pasteur vaccinated Joseph Meister, a 9-year-old kid who had been bitten by a rabid dog, on July 6, 1885. His prominence grew quickly as a result of the vaccine's effectiveness. The Pasteur Institute in Paris, which opened on November 14, 1888, was the subject of an international fundraising campaign.

Personal Life

Pasteur had been partially paralysed owing to a serious brain stroke since 1868, but he was able to continue his studies. He spent his 70th birthday at the Sorbonne, where he was joined by a number of prominent scientists, including the well-known British surgeon Joseph Lister. During that time, his paralysis worsened and he died on Sep 28, 1895. Later that year, Pasteur's ashes were moved to the Pasteur Institute's Neo-Byzantine crypt. There is also a book on the Louis Pasteur autobiography, otherwise called Louis Pasteur biography book.

Research Career of Louis Pasteur

In 1843, Pasteur was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (a Parisian teachers' college), where he heard many lectures by a French scientist named Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas and eventually became Dumas' teaching assistant. Pasteur received his master's degree in science in 1845, followed by an advanced degree in physical sciences.

Later, he earned a Doctorate degree in sciences in 1847. He was also appointed as a physics professor at the Dijon Lycée (a secondary school) in 1848, but he quickly took a position as a chemistry professor (University of Strasbourg).

Molecular Asymmetry

Pasteur was perplexed by the discovery of a German chemist called Eilhardt Mitscherlich, who demonstrated that paratartrates and tartrates behaved differently toward polarized light: tartrates rotated the polarised light plane, whereas paratartrates did not. This was a unique situation because the substances had the same chemical characteristics. The tartrate crystals had asymmetric shapes, which related to their optical asymmetry, according to Pasteur.

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He made a surprising notice that crystalline paratartrate is composed of a mixture of crystals in the right-handed configuration. However, when he manually separated these crystals, he discovered that they had left and right asymmetry. To put it another way, an optically inactive balanced mixture of both left and right crystals. As a result of the optical activity, Pasteur discovered the existence of molecular asymmetry, which is the strong foundation of stereochemistry.

Pasteur spent the following ten years researching the potential of organic molecules to rotate the plane of polarised light. Also, he studied the relationship which existed between molecular configuration and crystal structure. His research convinced him that asymmetry was the most basic property of living things.

Germ Theory of Fermentation

When Pasteur was a chemistry professor, he was invited to assist in the addressing of difficulties linked to alcoholic fermentation at a nearby distillery, and as a result, he launched a series of investigations on the subject. His special work on these problems led to his involvement in tackling varied economic and practical problems involving fermentation.

All his efforts proved successful in unravelling the majority of these problems, and new theoretical implications have emerged from his work. He also looked at a variety of aspects of fermentation, such as the production of chemicals like lactic acid, which is responsible for milk sourness, and butyric acid fermentation.