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While waiting for an appropriate appointment, Pasteur continued to work as a laboratory assistant at the École Normale. There he made further progress on the research he had begun for his doctoral dissertation—investigating the ability of certain crystals or solutions to rotate plane-polarized light clockwise or counterclockwise, that is, to exhibi...

Pasteur secured his academic credentials with scientific papers on this and related research and was then appointed in 1848 to the faculty of sciences in Strasbourg and in 1854 to the faculty in Lille. There he launched his studies on fermentation. Pasteur sided with the minority view among his contemporaries that each type of fermentation is carri...

At the same time Pasteur began his fermentation studies, he adopted a related view on the cause of diseases. He and a minority of other scientists believed that diseases arose from the activities of microorganisms—germ theory. Opponents believed that diseases, particularly major killer diseases, arose in the first instance from a weakness or imbala...

Pasteur did not, however, fully engage in studies of disease until the late 1870s, after several cataclysmic changes had rocked his life and that of the French nation. In 1868, in the middle of his silkworm studies, he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed his left side. Soon thereafter, in 1870, France suffered a humiliating defeat at the han...

In his research campaign against disease Pasteur first worked on expanding what was known about anthrax, but his attention was quickly drawn to fowl cholera. This investigation led to his discovery of how to make vaccines by attenuating, or weakening, the microbe involved. Pasteur usually “refreshed” the laboratory cultures he was studying—in this ...

Pasteur then wanted to move into the more difficult area of human disease, in which ethical concerns weighed more heavily. He looked for a disease that afflicts both animals and humans so that most of his experiments could be done on animals, although here too he had strong reservations. Rabies, the disease he chose, had long terrified the populace...

Pasteur’s career shows him to have been a great experimenter, far less concerned with the theory of disease and immune response than with dealing directly with diseases by creating new vaccines. Still it is possible to discern his notions on the more abstract topics. Early on he linked the immune response to the biological, especially nutritional, ...