Year: 1947
Type: article
Abstract: I feel that it is a very great honour to have been asked to deliver this lecture on Pasteur, but I accepted the invitation with great trepidation, for I felt that I should be unable to do justice to so memorable a subject.We are grateful to M. Leveille for coming to London and setting up this Pasteur exhibition.I saw it in Paris and was struck then with its comprehensiveness and arrangement.But M. Leveille knows that the genius of Louis Pasteur is revered in Britain as it is in France.Louis Pasteur was just a citizen of France-not an ordinary citizen, as it turned out; and there was nothing in his origin to indicate that when he died-and 50 years after his death-he would be a national hero.His great grand- father, grandfather, and his father were tanners.Perhaps had circumstances been different one of these ancestors might have become famous, but son followed father in an essential occupation.Pasteur's father, who on the battle- field had been decorated with the Legion of Honour, appreciated the advantages of education, and Louis, instead of becoming a tanner, was admitted to the Ecole Normale in Paris, where he seized with avidity the chances of learn- ing, particularly chemistry and physics, under the distin- guished teachers of that institution.He obtained his degree, but even then there was no real indication of his coming fame.Louis Pasteur in his youth and throughout his life believed in hard work.He lived for his work and put his whole heart and soul into it.His was not a 40-hour week.He worked so constantly in his laboratory that it was inevitable that he became a beautiful technician, and throughout his life he had no use for sloppily performed or ill-conceived experiments.His first momentous dis- covery was the dissymmetry of crystals.Like many others, he had been puzzled by the difference between tartaric and racemic (or paratartaric) acids.These two chemicals appeared to be identical in every way except that, whereas racemic acid solutions had no influence on polarized light, tartaric solutions rotated this to the right.When Pasteur examined the crystals of a salt of racemic acid with the microscope he noticed that the crystals were not quite identical and could be divided into two groups.In one of these groups a particular facet was on the right side while the other group had the same facet on the left.They were in fact mirror images of each other and might thus be compared with a pair of gloves.Pasteur had vision, and with extraordinary care and perseverance he separated his rightand left-handed crystals into distinct groups.
Source: BMJ
Author: A. Fleming
Institution: Palais de la Decouverte
Language: French
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4213300903