Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteurwas a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, and his discoveries have saved countless lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. His medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. He is best known...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 December 1822
CityDole, France
CountryFrance
Time is the best appraiser of scientific work, and I am aware that an industrial discovery rarely produces all its fruit in the hands of its first inventor.
Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of invention. ... [Do not] share the opinion of those narrow minds who disdain everything in science which has not an immediate application. ... A theoretical discovery has but the merit of its existence: it awakens hope, and that is all. But let it be cultivated, let it grow, and you will see what it will become.
In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.
To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.
When you believe you have found an important scientific fact, and are feverishly curious to publish it, constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, fight yourself, try and ruin your own experiments, and only proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses. But when, after so many efforts you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul.
Change only favours minds that are diligently looking and preparing for discovery.
One must work; one must work. I have done what I could.
Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.
Worship the spirit of criticism.
Science proceeds by successive answers to questions more and more subtle, coming nearer and nearer to the very essence of phenomena.
Outsidetheir laboratories, thephysicianand chemist are soldiers without arms on the field of battle.
No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid.