Today, I am thankful for the knowledge that what we don’t see still meaningfully impacts our lives.
Back in April, I shared the tale of an inquisitive scientist who saved the French wine industry. After examining both normal and spoiled wine under a microscope, Louis Pasteur discovered that a microorganism, Acetobacter aceti, was eliciting a reaction that chemically converts alcohol into acetic acid, the compound found in vinegar. Pasteur postulated that the souring process could be stopped if the bacteria could be eliminated. In 1865, he would patent a sterilization process, later called ‘pasteurization’, thereby saving the French wine industry from inevitable ruin. However, Louis Pasteur is known for so much more than just a standard practice performed on liquid beverages. In many ways, his life work spearheaded the field of microbiology and organic chemistry. In fact, I ‘d like to share three additional achievements in his lifetime that brought a huge appreciation to a world that is entirely naked to the human eye.
Born in central France in 1922, Louis Pasteur was the epitome of an average student. He preferred painting, sketching, and fishing to his academic pursuits, so he struggled to gain entry to college. Nevertheless, he eventually persevered and gradated at the age of 20 from the College Royal at Bensancon. After several failed attempts, he gained entry to the Ecole Normale in Paris, where he eventually became ‘serious’ about school. He received a master of science, followed by a doctorate degree in chemistry. As a professor in chemistry, he taught at Strasbourg and Lille, before returning to his alma mater in Paris.
At the age of 27, while at Strasbourg, he introduced the world to the concept of stereochemistry – a field dedicated to the spatial arrangement of atoms that form the structure of a molecule. In studying the sediment of wine (Pasteur clearly liked wine!), he discovered that polarized light passing through the sediment changed angles due to the presence of microscopic crystals. He postulated that the crystals of two compounds, tartaric acid and paratartaric acid, must indeed be different because they rotated plane-polarized light in opposite ways, even though the chemical composition of the two compounds was identical. Under the microscope, he discovered that the crystals looked identical with the one exception being that they were mirror images of one another. After he confirmed that separate piles of these unique crystals refracted the light in opposite directions, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that a mixture of the two compounds cancelled the effect of the polarized light. He opined that that the chemicals were ‘chiral’– much like our hands – in the sense that they were identical, mirror images of one another. Today, this knowledge of stereoisomers has served as a foundational principle of organic chemistry.
Pasteur then turned his attention to the silk industry. A massive blight was destroying the silk farms in southern France. Renowned for saving the wine industry at the age of 32 while at Lille, Pasteur, then 43, traveled to Ales to tackle the sickening silk saga. After three years of careful examination, he discovered that silkworms were dying as a result of two separate infections, one caused by a parasite and another by a bacterium. He developed an intricate process to examine the moths after they laid their eggs to see if they contained the microbe(s). If so, the eggs were discarded, but, if not, they could be used to garner silk. His technique not only saved the French silk industry, it also became a best practice for the silk-producing industry worldwide – much like pasteurization.
Finally, and probably most importantly, Pasteur introduced the world to the practice of vaccinology. Although Edward Jenner is credited as developing the fist vaccine for smallpox in 1795, he did so using an inoculation of an entirely different virus, cowpox, into a normal, uninfected host. Pasteur discovered that if one could weaken a microbial pathogen and then allow it to infect its host, the host would develop a protective immune response against the more potent form of the pathogen. The best part is that he discovered this by accident. While working with the organism responsible for cholera in chickens, Pasturella multocida, he serendipitously uncovered that chickens infected with a slightly spoiled broth of the bacteria did not succumb to the infection and were even protected from future infections. In due time, he would discover that bacteria (or viruses) manipulated in culture could be attenuated to a certain degree and subsequent inoculations of these ‘weakened’ pathogens into animals would protect them from future infections. In due time, Pasteur created vaccines for chicken cholera, cattle anthrax, swine erysipelas, and even human rabies. His methodology serves as the basis for many of the vaccines we have created to this day to prevent conditions such as measles, mumps, and rubella.
Sadly, at the age of 46, Pasteur suffered a major stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. Amazingly, all his advances in vaccinology progressed after he sustained this neurological insult. At the age of 66, the University of Sorbonne, where he had settled as a professor after saving the silk industry, founded the Institute Pasteur, where important biomedical research continues to this day. Sadly, on this day (Sept 28) in 1895, Pasteur died after suffering another stroke. Today, his remains are interred in a vault at the Institute Pasteur.
So, this evening, as you raise your wine glass to toast an illustrious achievement, remember to pay tribute to the man who taught us that what we cannot see might actually be more important than what we do.
Oh, yeah, he also guaranteed that your wine was worth the sip.
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