Louis Pasteur

Main Characters:

Louis Pasteur, Emile Roux, his assistant: Marie Pasteur, his wife, and Joseph Meister.

Overall Theme:

Having lost three daughters to disease, Louis Pasteur is determined to solve the mysteries of the source and prevention of disease.  As other scientists laugh at Pasteur and mock his ideas, he continues to prevail in his experiments with animals.

Summary:

The time is 1860, and cholera is beginning to spread throughout France’s chicken population.  Louis Pasteur and his assistant, Emile Roux, collect samples and deduce that disease can be transmitted through air.  They then draw blood from the chickens and see an unidentified germ in the specimens.

While Pasteur and Roux work with the samples of blood, Pasteur has a debilitating stroke.  From his bed, he expresses his determination to live, and continues to work with Roux by writing him notes.  He tells Roux to inject the chickens with the contaminated blood.  The chickens die.

When Pasteur finally comes back to the laboratory, they discover the blood has altered from time.  When they inject this blood into the chickens again, the cholera germs are killed.They have created a vaccination for the chickens.

Meanwhile, sheep begin to die from anthrax. Even though other scientists mock Pasteur’s findings, they agree to let him experiment on 25 sheep.  They are all surprised to see the vaccine work.

Pasteur is determined for vaccinations to work on people.  He and Roux continue to experiment for four years until a young boy, Joseph Meister, contracts rabies from a wolf and his father brings him to Pasteur.  Although hesitant to experiment on a human.  Pasteur agrees to give him the shot.  After five long days of waiting and another shot, Joseph Meister recovers and the world’s first human vaccination is introduced.

Background:

Disease was the mask of death in the days before  modern medicine and vaccinations.  There was no immunization from such diseases as chicken pox, measles and no cure for rabies.  Louis Pasteur, a scientist, knew that a solution could be found.

With limited technology and knowledge for disease, Pasteur embarked on a mission that gave us the needed preventive vaccination for today.  It is because of his conviction to live that we are able to cure and prevent disease in animals and humans.

Pasteur, upon celebrating his 70^th birthday, told his fellow colleagues, “My invincible belief is that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war…the future will not belong to the conquerors, but to the saviors of mankind.”  By standing firm on his belief, Pasteur has become one of the most famous scientists throughout the world.