Ever heard of Pasteurization? It was a method created by Louis Pasteur to stop milk and

wine from carrying disease. Louis Pasteur is a French chemist and microbiologist from

the 19th century. He had many influences in both the causing and prevention of many

diseases. Now let’s take a look in detail at the many accomplishments of this biologist.

Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, on December 27th 1822. Louis Pasteur comes from

a poor family of tanners, not a likely place for such a person to sprout from. He was an

average student early on in his life and was also very good at painting and drawing. In

1840 the young Louis acquired his Bachelor of Arts degree and two years later in 1842,

his bachelor’s in science, at the École Normale Supérieure.

In 1848 he shortly worked as a professor of physics, and a year later became a

professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg. At this university he met and later

married Marie Laurent, whom he had 5 children with. Sadly of his five children only two

of them lived all the way to adulthood, the others killed by a disease called typhoid. This

is actually the reason that Pasteur decided to try to find cures for the multiple diseases that had killed his children.

Pasteur has had many impacts on biology, such as pasteurization and certain cures for

diseases and vaccines. Focusing on pasteurization, he was faced with a problem nobody

could seem to answer. Why did some wine go bad and why didn’t some? He sought to

find the answer to this question.

Looking at the ‘bad’ wine through a microscope revealed many germs within the

wine. In order to kill these germs within the ‘bad’ wine he attempted to boil the wine and

then cool it down. This method was successful and like many other narcissistic scientists

he named it after himself, Pasteurization. Furthermore he wanted to prove that germs

could get into the wine from the air, and thought it would be worth a shot to try and stop

these germs from infiltrating the good wine.

Now is the fun part, why did I choose to write about this scientist in particular?

Simple! Because when I started reading about him it grabbed my attention and I was

instantly intrigued about his contributions and discoveries which helps people in

everyday life, whether they are alcoholics, the occasional drinker, or somebody who

enjoys milk. Yes, in fact milk is pasteurized just like wine. I found it interesting how

wine could be turned bad by just germs.

I also wondered why some germs turn the wine bad, because essentially wine is just

grape juice that has been infected with germs and been left to ferment until the sugar is

converted into alcohol. Which germs are good and which are bad? And germs aren’t all

that causes fermentation; fungi help too, like yeast.

Reading about how things can be made can be interesting, and how things can go

wrong in this case with the ‘bad’ wine. I guess I was just interested and wanted to learn

more about what he did, how he did it, and how it helped the world. One thing that

caught my attention also is that he knew Edward Jenner, a British man who created the

small pox vaccine. Louis continued the development of the first vaccines after Edward Jenner’s

work.

Louis Pasteur was a great pioneer in the study of germs; he led us to pasteurization,

and also to cures for diseases and vaccines to stop them. In short, he helped man kind

immensely, without him we may still be trying to identify cures for some diseases or may

be behind in the scientific fields of diseases than we currently are.

Bibliography:

http://www.slideshare.net/wal147/louis-pasteurand-robert-koch-booklet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ni-Pe/Pasteur-Louis.html#b