(The Nationalist, 27 December 2002)
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was born and reared in France. He had an average education. His father suggested to him that he become a teacher, but he preferred to study science, a new and uncertain course at the time.
The young Pasteur was lucky in having a professor who recognized and encouraged his unusual abilities. What became evident early on was that Pasteur looked at things differently. He asked different questions, for example. Some thought him a pain and urged him to be more like his peers.
Pasteur came up with the idea that diseases are caused by germs, and that these can be found anywhere, even in the air. This seems self-evident to us, but was considered novel at the time. One of the ideas that followed was vaccination, that is, the injection of a tiny quantity of germs, either living or dead, into an animal or person, so as to trigger a defensive reaction by the body. It would thereby be prepared if a real infection came.
Some people were outraged by this. It seemed like giving people disease instead of protecting them against it. But it worked. He developed a vaccine against rabies, an animal-borne disease which kills by slow strangulation. He also developed vaccines against smallpox, anthrax and cholera. In the twentieth century, smallpox killed about 500 million people, but was declared eradicated in 1980, the last known case occurring in a village in Somalia in 1977. There have been no known cases of the disease since then, the major medical success story of the twentieth century. It is impossible to estimate how many lives were saved by Pasteur’s discoveries, but it is probably in the hundreds of millions.
It wasn’t only lives he saved, but jobs. When French vine-growers found that their wine was going sour and sales were falling, Pasteur found the cause: the yeast used in fermentation needed to be heated to a higher temperature so as to achieve its purpose without harmful side-effects. The French wine industry was saved. He also identified the microbes which were destroying silkworms, and thereby saved the French silk industry.
He discovered too that if cows’ milk was heated to a certain temperature this would kill the germs which contributed to TB. This process came to be known as pasteurization.
We can’t all do the things Pasteur did, but we can all use our God-given talents. He had the courage to look at things differently and to ask new questions. One person can make a difference.