Louis Pasteur by Nicola Kingsley - National STEM Centre

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Pasteur dictating notes on silkworms to his wife 8 he came home, she wrote to his dictation, copied his notes in her clear handwriting, and talked through his ideas with him. She bore him five children, provided the stable family life that he valued, and patiently accepted that for Pasteur, science would always come first. One day she would write to her children: "Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and in a word continues the life I began with him 35 years ago."
I Cha~ter 2 Fermentations A few years later Pasteur moved to Lille, w.here his job as Professor of Chemistry required him to give just one lecture a week, leaving plenty of time for his scientific interests. One day he was visited by the father of one of his students, a Monsieur Bigot. Like many of the people in that area Monsieur Bigot made his living manufacturing vinegar. He had come to ask Professor Pasteur for his help with a problem. A lot of the vinegar was turning out to be bad, and nobody knew why. They were losing money. Pasteur was interested in the problem. The vinegar was produced from beet juice by a process called fermentation, and scientists disagreed about what this process really was. The accepted view was that it was a purely chemical reaction in which some chemicals changed into new ones. What interested Pasteur was that some scientists had looked at fermenting juice through a microscope and found there a tiny microbe called yeast, which they thought played a part in fermentation. Four scientists had published writings claiming that the yeast somehow made the vinegar, but a well known scientist called Liebig said this could not be true. How.could anything so tiny that you could not even see it without a microscope be making all that vinegar? The idea was ridiculous. Liebig was very important, and when he said something people were willing to believe him. Pasteur visited the vats in which Monsieur Bigot made his vinegar. He took samples from them, and examined them under a microscope. In the samples from the vats producing good vinegar he could see tiny cells of yeast, which were sprouting new buds and seemed to be growing. In the 9
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Page 4 and 5: • Louis Pasteur
Page 6 and 7: Pasteur's house 6 at Dole Pasteur g
Page 10 and 11: Budding in yeast cells 10 bad vineg
Page 12 and 13: Pasteur in his laboratory 12 Pasteu
Page 14 and 15: A drop of pond water magnified to s
Page 16 and 17: 16 By 1859 no one had come any clos
Page 18 and 19: Mer de Glace on Mont Blanc where Pa
Page 20 and 21: 20 I ChaQter 4 A theory of disease
Page 22 and 23: The microscope used by Pasteur at W
Page 24 and 25: Lister greets Pasteur at the Sorbon
Page 26 and 27: 26 I Cha~ter 5 Farmyard microbes Wi
Page 28 and 29: Early vaccination for diphtheria 28
Page 30 and 31: Anthrax bacilli 30 with the disease
Page 32 and 33: A sheep being vaccinated 32 When he
Page 34 and 35: 34 His assistants brought the news
Page 36 and 37: Pasteur experimenting on a chlorofo
Page 38 and 39: Statue at the Pasteur Institute of
Page 40 and 41: The Pasteur Institute 40 The news o
Page 42: 42 Before his success with rabies,

Louis Pasteur by Nicola Kingsley - National STEM Centre

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