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( Pasteur)
Louis Pasteur (27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895), a French chemist and microbiologist, is best known for remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of disease. His experiments supported the germ theory, also reducing mortality from (child bed fever), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness; this process came to be called pasteurization. Pasteur is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and he is considered the founder of scientific oenology.[1] He is also credited with dispelling the theory of spontaneous generation with his experiment employing chicken broth and a goose neck flask. He also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the asymmetry of crystals.[2] He is buried beneath the Institute Pasteur, an incredibly rare honor in France, where being buried in a cemetery is mandatory save for the fewer than 300 "Great Men" who are entombed in the Pantheon. Louis Jean Pasteur was born in Dole in the Jura region of France and grew up in the town of Arbois.[2] There he later had his house and laboratory, which is a Pasteur museum today. His father, Jean Pasteur (1791-1864), was a poorly educated tanner[2] and a decorated Sergeant-Major of the Grande Armee. Louis's aptitude was recognized by his college headmaster, who recommended that the young man apply for the École Normale Supérieure, which accepted him. After serving briefly as professor of physics at Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at Strasbourg University,[3] where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on 29 May 1849, and together they had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Throughout his life, Louis Pasteur remained an ardent Catholic. A well-known quotation illustrating this is attributed to him "The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant's wife." In Pasteur's early works as a chemist, he resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid (1849). A solution of this compound derived from living things (specifically, wine lees) rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it. The mystery was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its chemical reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.[2]Upon examination of the minuscule crystals of Sodium ammonium tartrate, Pasteur noticed that the crystals came in two asymmetric forms that were mirror images of one another. Tediously sorting the crystals by hand gave two forms of the compound solutions of one form rotated polarized light clockwise, while the other form rotated light counterclockwise. An equal mix of the two had no polarizing effect on the light. Pasteur correctly deduced the molecule in question was asymmetric and could exist in two different forms that resemble one another as would left- and right-hand gloves, and that the biological source of the compound provided purely the one type.[4] This was the first time anyone had demonstrated chiral molecules.Pasteur's doctoral thesis on crystallography attracted the attention of M. Puillet and he helped Pasteur garner a position of professor of chemistry at the Faculté (College) of Strasbourg.[3]In 1854 he was named Dean of the new Faculty of Sciences in Lille, and in 1856 he was made administrator and director of scientific studies of the École Normale Supérieure.[3] Louis demonstrated that the fermentation process is caused by the growth of microorganisms, and that the growth of microorganisms in nutrient broths is not due to spontaneous generation[5] but rather to biogenesis (Omne vivum ex ovo).
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