Pasteur was born in Dole, France on December 7, 1822 the son of a poor tanner. When he was two months old the family moved to the town of Arbois, where Louis grew up and went to school. He was a hard working student but not an especially brilliant one. His early education was received at the Collage Communal of Arbois, but Louis had the tendency to slack off on his schoolwork. Devoting most of his time to fishing and sketching, it seemed that he would become a painter. When he chose science as one of his courses he grew interested. When he was 17 years old he

Pasteur spent the rest of his life working on the causes of various diseases such as septicemia, cholera, diphtheria, fowl cholera, tuberculosis, and smallpox, trying to prevent them by means of vaccination. He is best known for his investigations concerning the prevention of rabies, otherwise known in humans as hydrophobia. Human beings contracted rabies when they are bitten by an animal that is suffering from the disease. Rabies slowly destroys the central nervous system by attacking the spinal cord. Pasteur reasoned that it might be possible to immunize people after they have been bitten but before destruction of the spinal cord began. He took spinal cord tissues of animals that had died of rabies and dried them for varying periods of time. Than he made inoculations of the tissues and injected them into another stricken animal. The first inoculation was from the driest, weakest creature, and each successive inoculation was stronger. After repeated failures, he finally succeeded in halting the development of rabies in an infected dog. The treatment required fourteen inoculations.

As a result of his discovery in 1848 he devoted himself to what he called dissymmetry, "pointing out that inorganic substances are not dissymmetrical in their crystallization, while all of the products of vegetable and animal life are dissymmetric" (Grant 50). He concluded that there was some great biological principal underlining this.

received a degree of bachelor of letters at the College Royal de Besancon. For the next three years he tutored younger students and prepared for the Ecole Normal Superieure, a noted teacher - training college in Paris. In order to devote himself to science, in 1847 Pasteur earned his doctorate focusing on physics and chemistry under Dumas, Balard, and Biot. His father helped him, but he had to support himself partly by his own labors. Becoming an assistant to one of his teachers, he began research that led to a significant discovery.

Louis Pasteur received many honors during his life. Grant summarized his achievements quite nicely:

Pasteur published his first paper on the formation of lactic acid and its function in souring milk in 1857. That same year he was appointed manager and director of scientific studies at his old school, the Ecole Normale Superieure. During the next several years he extended his studies into the germ theory. He spend much time proving to doubting scientists that germs do not originate spontaneously in matter but enter from the outside.

Fully aware of the presence of microorganisms in nature, Pasteur undertook several experiments designed to address the questions of where these "germs" came from. Where they spontaneously produced in substances themselves, or were they introduced into substances from the environment? Pasteur concluded that the latter was always the case. His findings resulted in a fierce debate with the French biologist Felix Pouchet, and the noted English bacteriologist Henry Bastion, who maintained that under appropriate conditions instances of spontaneous generation could be found. Although a commission of the Academie des Sciences officially excepted Pasteur's results in 1864, these debates lasted well into the 1870's. Many improvements in the experimental techniques of microbiology came about because of the disbelief of Pasteur's ideas.

Vallery-Radot. Life of Pasteur. New York, 1902

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