Science
1822 to 1895, Dole
The chemist who proved that life comes only from life, founded germ theory, and built the first laboratory vaccines.
Start learning Louis →How a 26-year-old chemist, sorting microscopic crystals with a tweezers under a lens, discovered that the molecules of living things come in left- and right-handed forms - and that life itself prefers one hand. It was t…
How Pasteur overturned the reigning chemical theory of his age by proving that fermentation - the turning of sugar into alcohol, of milk into sour, of wine into vinegar - is not a dead chemical breakdown but the work of…
How Pasteur, with a swan-necked flask and a boiled broth, struck what he called the mortal blow against the ancient belief that living things spring spontaneously from dead matter. It was one of the most elegant experim…
How Pasteur carried his microbes from the brewery to the sickbed, arguing that specific living germs cause specific infectious diseases - the idea that, with Lister’s antiseptic surgery and the conquest of one pla…
How Pasteur discovered that a germ could be weakened - attenuated - in the laboratory until it no longer caused disease but still trained the body to resist it, turning Jenner’s lucky cowpox into a general method…
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