Louis Pasteur

Miracle Cure
by William Rosen
Published 14 Apr 2017

It was the original site, and is still a working part of one of the world’s preeminent research laboratories: the Institut Pasteur, whose eponymous founder opened its doors in 1888. As much as anyone on earth, he could—and did—claim the honor of discovering the germ theory of disease and founding the new science of microbiology. Louis Pasteur was born to a family of tanners working in the winemaking town of Arbois, surrounded by the sights and smells of two ancient crafts whose processes depended on the chemical interactions between microorganisms and macroorganisms—between microbes, plants, and animals. Tanners and vintners perform their magic with hides and grapes through the processes of putrefaction and fermentation, whose complicity in virtually every aspect of food production, from pickling vegetables to aging cheese, would fascinate Pasteur long before he turned his attention to medicine.

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The dispute embraced not just fermentation, in which sugars are transformed into simpler compounds like carboxylic acids or alcohol, but the related process of putrefaction, the rotting and swelling of a dead body as a result of the dismantling of proteins. Credit: National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine Louis Pasteur, 1822–1895 The processes, although distinct, had always seemed to have something significant in common. Both are, not to put too fine a point on it, aromatic; the smell of rotten milk or cheese is due to the presence of butyric acid (which also gives vomit its distinctive smell), while the smells of rotting flesh come from the chemical process that turns amino acids into the simple organic compounds known as amines, in this case, the aptly named cadaverine and putrescine, which were finally isolated in 1885.

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Though its age and extent was unknown to Cohn, he did know that the microorganism that Koch had found was part of this bacterial universe. He published Koch’s work in his journal, Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen—in English, Contributions on Plant Biology—in 1876. The discovery immediately turned Koch into one of Europe’s best-known life scientists. Which brought him to the attention of an even more famous one: Louis Pasteur. In 1877, Pasteur took it upon himself to resolve what remained of the debate about the causes of anthrax. The bacteria isolated by Koch were still thought to be, in the words of at least one biologist, “neither the cause nor necessary effect of splenic fever [i.e., anthrax]” since exposure to oxygen destroyed them, but material containing the dead organisms still caused anthrax.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
by Paul A. Offit
Published 1 Jan 2007

Jeryl Lynn Eight Doors The Destroying Angel Coughs, Colds, Cancers, and Chickens The Monster Maker Political Science Blood Animalcules An Uncertain Future Unrecognized Genius Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Searchable Terms About the Author Copyright About the Publisher PROLOGUE Scientists aren't famous. They never endorse products or sign autographs or fight through crowds of screaming admirers. But at least you know a few of their names, like Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; or Albert Schweitzer, the missionary who built hospitals in Africa; or Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization; or Marie Curie, the discoverer of radiation; or Albert Einstein, the physicist who defined the relationship between mass and energy. But I'd bet not one of you knows the name of the scientist who saved more lives than all other scientists combined-a man who survived Depression-era poverty; the harsh, unforgiving plains of southeastern Montana; abandonment by his father; the early death of his mother; and, at the end of his life, the sad realization that few people knew who he was or what he had done: Maurice Hilleman, the father of modern vaccines.

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In the late 1700s Edward Jenner, a physician working in southern England, made the world's first vaccine. Jenner found that he could protect people from smallpox-a disease that has claimed five hundred million victims-by injecting them with cowpox, a related virus. One hundred years passed. In the late 1800s Louis Pasteur, a chemist working in Paris, made the world's second vaccine. Pasteur's vaccine, made by drying spinal cords from infected rabbits, prevented the single most deadly infection of man-rabies. Only one person has ever survived rabies without receiving a rabies vaccine. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientists made six more vaccines.

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And in 1883 in Bremen, Germany, arm-to-arm transfer caused a massive outbreak of hepatitis. Although Edward Jenner made the first viral vaccine, he didn’t know that smallpox and cowpox were related viruses. That was because he’d never heard of viruses. Edward Jenner made his observations several decades before scientists showed what viruses were and how they reproduced. FROM LOUIS PASTEUR, A FRENCH CHEMIST, HILLEMAN LEARNED THAT vaccines could be made from dangerous human viruses. (Jenner had used a cow virus.) Pasteur developed humankind’s second vaccine, one that prevented a uniformly fatal disease: rabies. On July 4, 1885, a rabid dog attacked a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister in the town of Meissengott, a small village in the province of Alsace, France.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

An even greater challenge was enabling urbanites to consume food items that were not generally cooked—like wine and milk products. The sophisticated urban societies of East Asia appear to have invented a version of the process now named for Louis Pasteur centuries before the birth of the famous French scientist. The Western adoption of pasteurization had its roots in the scientific debate over the spontaneous generation of living organisms, such as bacteria. In one of the great battles of nineteenth-century science, the French chemist Louis Pasteur faced off against the far older and in many ways more distinguished naturalist Félix Pouchet before the French Academy of Sciences. Pasteur showed that when sterilized liquids were placed in sealed swan-necked glass containers, there was no subsequent growth of microorganisms.

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and spend less overall: Cutler et al., “Explaining the Slowdown in Medical Spending Growth among the Elderly, 1999–2012.” A good health system: Daschle et al., Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis. fewer than four hundred geriatricians: Petriceks et al., “Trends in Geriatrics Graduate Medical Education Programs and Positions, 2001 to 2018.” Reed and Louis Pasteur: “Louis Pasteur,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. exclusively on medical insurance: Lubrano, “The World Has Suffered through Other Deadly Pandemics. But the Response to Coronavirus Is Unprecedented.” mostly contained to Asia: World Health Organization Global Influenza Program Surveillance Network, “Evolution of H5N1 Avian Influenza Viruses in Asia.”

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Vox, March 27, 2020. www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/27/21194402/coronavirus-masks-n95-respirators-personal-protective-equipment-ppe. ———. “Why America’s Coronavirus Testing Barely Improved in April.” Vox, May 1, 2020. www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21242589/coronavirus-testing-swab-reagent-supply-shortage. “Louis Pasteur.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed December 23, 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Pasteur. Lovelace, Berkeley, Jr. “Warren Buffett: Bezos, Dimon and I Aim for Something Bigger on Health Care Than Just Shaving Costs.” CNBC, February 26, 2018. www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/buffett-my-health-care-venture-with-bezos-and-dimon-is-going-for-something-bigger-than-shaving-a-few-percent-off-costs.html.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature
by Ben Mezrich
Published 3 Jul 2017

On his return, his colleagues had purposely kept him in the dark as to their progress, wanting him to see it for himself, firsthand. He knew that a thing like this—the creature he was seeing, something that shouldn’t have existed, that hadn’t existed for more than three thousand years—wasn’t simply possible. It was inevitable. CHAPTER THREE Today 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON. Ten minutes past two in the morning, and the warrenlike lab tucked into the second floor of the glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School was as alive as the middle of the day. Teams of young postdocs, grad students, and harried fourth-year med students huddled over high-tech workstations, engaged in what appeared to be a highly choreographed dance involving pipettes, Petri dishes, and DNA-sequencing arrays.

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You can extract that genome—it’s kind of like a linear tape—and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell. —GEORGE M. CHURCH CHAPTER NINE Early Fall 2008 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON. Sometimes, it’s the strange questions that keep you up at night. Church leaned back in his chair, his long legs tucked beneath the desk in the middle of his stark, brightly lit office, nestled deep in a corner of his second-floor laboratory. His right hand was still resting on the phone in front of him, long after he’d hung up, his feet bouncing against the carpet beneath the desk in the self-taught routine he used to keep himself awake.

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PART THREE I like to keep the median age in my lab low so we can dream together and make those dreams come true. They don’t yet think things are impossible. —GEORGE M. CHURCH It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow. —GEORGE M. CHURCH CHAPTER FIFTEEN Winter 2012 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, NEW RESEARCH BUILDING, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. Luhan Yang was moving fast as she navigated the crowded hallway that bisected the third floor of the New Research Building. Although everyone walked quickly at Harvard Medical School, Luhan was a bullet cutting through the stream of med students, lab technicians, and professors, determined not to be late to the open afternoon seminar on knockout genes and antimalarial mosquitoes.

Longshot
by David Heath
Published 18 Jan 2022

Barranco, “The First Live Attenuated Vaccines.” 24. J. M. S. Pearce, “Louis Pasteur and Rabies: A Brief Note,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 73, no. 82 (2002), http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.73.1.82. 25. Maya Prabhu, “The Age of Modern Vaccines: An Abridged History of Vaccines, Part 2,” Gavi, April 7, 2021, https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/age-modern-vaccines-abridged-history-vaccines-part-2. 26. Pearce, “Louis Pasteur and Rabies.” 27. Pearce, “Louis Pasteur and Rabies.” 28. Barranco, “The First Live Attenuated Vaccines.” 29. “Louis Pasteur and the Development of the Attenuated Vaccine,” VBI Vaccines, November 23, 2016, https://www.vbivaccines.com/evlp-platform/louis-pasteur-attenuated-vaccine. 30.

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Vaccinae is derived from Latin for cow.18 In what may be his most lasting scientific contribution, Jenner named the new procedure vaccination.19 Parliament banned variolation in 1843 and later made the cowpox vaccine mandatory.20 But it wasn’t until the late 1800s that the world had its first true vaccine.21 And it happened thanks to a negligent laboratory assistant. In 1879, French chemist Louis Pasteur left on a holiday after instructing his assistant to inject a batch of chickens with fresh cultures of Pasteurella multocida, the bacterium that causes chicken cholera. The assistant forgot before he departed for his own holiday. The untended brew sat in the lab for a month, plugged with just cotton wool.22 When Pasteur realized the mistake, he might have just tossed the bacteria.

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“Louis Pasteur and the Development of the Attenuated Vaccine,” VBI Vaccines, November 23, 2016, https://www.vbivaccines.com/evlp-platform/louis-pasteur-attenuated-vaccine. 30. “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999 Impact of Vaccines Universally Recommended for Children—United States, 1990–1998,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 2, 1999, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm. 31. Paul A. Offit, Vaccinated, xi–xii. 32. Nicholas Bakalar, “The Unfolding of Polio,” New York Times, March 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/science/the-unfolding-of-polio.html. 33. “History of Polio,” History of Vaccines, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline/polio. 34.

Milk!
by Mark Kurlansky

Poor babies were fed from animal horns. It seems likely that milk was not originally produced for feeding babies or for drinking. Instead, as an extremely unstable product, it was probably cured, hardened, soured, or fermented into a variety of highly nutritious and stable foods. Many centuries before Louis Pasteur, the ancient Assyrians knew, probably from their own experience, that the only way to keep fresh milk from becoming poisonous was to boil it. The resulting scum on the pot mixed with breadcrumbs was a children’s treat, which they lapped directly from the pot. It was believed back then, and many twenty-first-century people would agree, that boiled milk lacks flavor and that only the scum and the skin left on top are good to eat.

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Those who abstained from milk, cheese, and all dairy products in the late summer were not stricken, and even those that were, but then abstained from dairy, had only a mild attack. Some suspected that the disease was caused by a poisonous dew that formed at night. Others suspected that it was caused by an invisible microorganism—one of the early versions of Louis Pasteur’s later “germ theory.” That was an astute guess, but it actually had nothing to do with the cause of this disease. Cows grazed on the poisonous white snakeroot plant during late summer and early fall droughts, when the normal grasses were not available and the herds foraged for alternatives. Cows that grazed in enclosed pastures with few weeds did not become infected.

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Borden, on the other hand, offered New Yorkers milk in a can for their babies that was both safe and sweet. 12 A NEW AND ENDLESS FIGHT Those for whom it has seemed odd that the French, who have had so little interest in drinking milk, could have such an impact on milk production can take comfort in the fact that Louis Pasteur was not particularly interested in milk. His concern and his research were primarily focused on beer and wine. But his idea, his “germ theory”—so called because it took time before it was accepted as fact—had a huge impact on dairies and on public health and medicine in general. Easy to state but complicated to demonstrate, Pasteur’s theory was that there are tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye, that cause disease—and other effects, such as fermentation.

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
by Ira Rutkow
Published 8 Mar 2022

Lumet. Louis Pasteur. Translated by Frederic Cooper. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914. Kelley, E. C., ed. “Joseph Lister.” Medical Classics 2 (1937): 4–101. Latour, B. The Pasteurization of France. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988. Lawrence, C., and R. Dixey. “Practising on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease.” In Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, edited by C. Lawrence, 153–215. London: Routledge, 1992. Nuland, S. B. Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, 343–385. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Porter, J. R. “Louis Pasteur: Achievements and Disappointments.”

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Clearly, surgery needed both anesthesia and antisepsis, but in terms of overall importance, knowledge of bacteria and how to control their behavior had a greater singular impact. * * * Surgical infections were tragic and scientific explanations were needed. The answers came primarily through the research of two geniuses. They were men who saw things that other individuals did not: Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, and Joseph Lister, an English surgeon. Pasteur’s discoveries changed Medicine in many ways, but it was their relevance to wound infections that had the greatest impact on the development of surgery. He was born in the Jura, an area of lakes and mountains in eastern France. In his early twenties, Pasteur moved to Paris, where, in 1847, he graduated from the renowned École Normale Supérieure, having submitted two theses, one in chemistry and the other in physics.

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It was at the University of Lille that Pasteur voiced one of the most famous quotes in the annals of education and science: “dans les champs de l’observation, le hasard ne favorise que les espirits préparés (in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind) (Oeuvres de Pasteur, 7 vols., ed. Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot [Paris: Masson et Cie, 1939], 7:131). 12. SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

I ask why so many people believe we are getting stuck at the frontier, and consider what it might mean to say that when so much around us seems to be changing, when ideas appear so plentiful. Let's begin by looking at an area that concerns us all: medicine. 2 The Breakthrough Problem Matters of Life and Death Summer, 1879 Louis Pasteur, aged fifty-seven, already the most feted scientist of his age, was on the cusp of a new breakthrough. Pasteur had been studying chicken cholera. While preparing the bacillus, he accidentally left the cultures in his laboratory for the summer. Returning in the autumn, Pasteur stumbled across his old experiment.

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The world's great laboratories also count: the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, with its twelve Nobel Prizes, CERN or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. So too would a range of institutes supporting diversity of innovative thinking – anything from Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study to the MIT Media Lab, the Santa Fe Institute and Japan's RIKEN and the eponymous institutes of Max Planck, Louis Pasteur and Francis Crick. But the diversity is greater still – you could argue that the structure of Oxbridge colleges enables experimental spaces, just as organisations like Y Combinator do for startup ideas, or ARPA does for technology in general. Lastly come even purer breakthrough organisations – those with a specific mission geared around executing a particular idea.

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Go bolder It's notable how many scientists with major discoveries to their name are also musicians, writers, philosophers, activists and communicators. Physicists like Einstein, Richard Feynman and Werner Heisenberg were accomplished musicians; Marie Curie, Fritz Haber and Erwin Schrödinger wrote poetry; biological and medical researchers from Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister to Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Dorothy Hodgkin were artists. Is there a connection? Looking at hundreds of discoveries and significant scientists from the UK, France, Germany and the US over the twentieth century gave J. Rogers Hollingsworth a clear answer: those with what is known as ‘high cognitive complexity’ were much more likely to make major discoveries.48 Scientists capable of internalising many different contexts, backgrounds and fields and hold them in their heads at once, comfortable with the ambiguity and contradiction, who were prepared to look from multiple viewpoints, who drank in complexity and range, had the biggest success.

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation
by Nicholas P. Money
Published 22 Feb 2018

Rees in 1870. 3 In t roduc t ion: y e ast y basics The combination of better microscopes and clever experiments on fermentation encouraged the conclusion that the yeast plant, as it became known, was the live agent that produced alcohol in wine and beer.4 Organic chemists continued to dispute these findings, choosing to believe that the objects described as cells were minerals precipitated from chemical reactions. They thought that alcohol was a product of pure chemistry rather than biochemistry. But with evidence mounting in the 1860s in favor of yeast as the catalyst, Louis Pasteur silenced most of the dissenting voices with a series of brilliant experimental demonstrations.5 Yeast was proven to be a living entity and recognized as a microorganism of spectacular consequence in human affairs. There is some Western bias in this assessment of yeast’s supremacy. Though the fungus is foundational to human civilization, our nutritional reliance on yeast is concentrated among the descendants of the Roman Empire living in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Australasia, and the Americas.

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Bubbles of gas brought the cells to the surface of the mash, where the foam was collected by skimming, washed with distilled water, allowed to settle, and compressed into cakes. The collaboration between Reininghaus and Mautner marked the conjunction between the industrialization of Europe and the new science of microbiology championed by Louis Pasteur. With our contemporary familiarity with microbes it is easy to devalue Pasteur’s experiments showing that bacteria and fungi soured milk and brewed beer, but they helped to sweep away 2,000 years of ignorance.10 The impact of this intellectual revolution on the practical business of brewing and baking was profound.

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Buehler, Bread Science: The Chemistry and Craft of Making Bread (Hillsborough, NC: Two Blue Books, 2006). 9. D. F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984); M. Roehr, in History of Modern Biotechnology I, edited by A. Fiechter (Amsterdam: Springer, 2000), 127–8. 10. P. Debré, Louis Pasteur, translated by E. Forster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 11. E. N. Horsford, Report on Vienna Bread (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875). 12. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, translated by G. E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003) 526. 190 not es 13.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
by Michael Strevens
Published 12 Oct 2020

There was no tribunal, no method, to sort the good photographic plates from the bad. The matter was settled the old-fashioned way, by a mix of partisan argument, political maneuvers, and propaganda. SCIENTIFIC TRIBUNALS MAY be uncommon, but they have been assembled on an ad hoc basis from time to time, and one in particular offers some signal lessons about science. Louis Pasteur is perhaps the most renowned of all French scientists—and surely the most revered by the French themselves. In his lifetime, from 1822 to 1895, he pioneered vaccination against anthrax and rabies, helped to discover the nature of fermentation, developed a sterilization technique (“pasteurization”) to prevent milk and wine from spoiling, laid the foundations for the germ theory of disease, and uncovered the first evidence for the remarkable fact that the chemistry of life is overwhelmingly composed of “right-handed” molecules.

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On the other hand, to form an opinion about a theoretical auxiliary assumption, such as Kelvin’s assumption that the earth is entirely solid, requires further evidence, and the significance of this evidence for the auxiliary assumption will itself depend on further auxiliary assumptions. Among these assumptions may appear the original hypothesis, forming an unbreakable circle. When Louis Pasteur, for example, ventured to show in the 1860s that life could not form spontaneously from an inorganic mix of “hay soup” and air, he needed a supply of air that was sterile, that is, free of the “spores” that he hypothesized to be the source of all mold, slime, and other growth in the soup. As you may remember, he and other experimenters tried various procedures to obtain spore-free air: heating the air, storing it in a greasy container, sampling it from alpine peaks.

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In each case, accusations of impropriety have spurred illuminating debates about the culpability of the scientists and the damage done to science—with some writers arguing for little culpability and less damage—but there is scant doubt that a certain amount of deliberate misrepresentation took place. 48 Eddington’s original presentation: Dyson, Eddington, and Davidson, “Determination of the Deflection of Light.” 52 Pasteur and Pouchet had sparred: This story is told in Collins and Pinch, The Golem, which also contains a brief, accessible, and rather unsympathetic account of Eddington’s maneuvers. 52 a combative and unfair disputant: A balanced biography that takes the notebooks into account is Patrice Debré’s Louis Pasteur. 53 the industry-supported group is considerably more likely: On soda: Bes-Rastrollo et al., “Financial Conflicts of Interest and Reporting Bias Regarding the Association between Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Weight Gain.” On second hand smoke: Barnes and Bero, “Why Review Articles on the Health Effects of Passive Smoking Reach Different Conclusions.”

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Published 22 Apr 2013

Yeast could now be treated simply as another ingredient rather than as a locally variable community of organisms in need of special care and feeding. In fact, as microbes go, S. cerevisiae is notable for not playing well with others, especially bacteria. Compared with wild yeasts, commercial yeast cannot survive very long in the acidic environment created by lactobacilli. While scientists have known about yeast since Louis Pasteur first identified it in 1857, the intricate microbial world within a wild sourdough culture like mine was a complete mystery until fairly recently—and remains at least a partial mystery even today. In 1970, a team of USDA scientists based in Albany, California, collected samples of sourdough starter from five San Francisco bakeries and conducted a kind of microbial census.

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All cooking is transformation and, rightly viewed, miraculous, but fermentation has always struck people as particularly mysterious. For one thing, the transformations are so dramatic: fruit juice into wine?!—a liquid with the power to change minds? For another, it has only been 155 years since Louis Pasteur figured out what was actually going on in a barrel of crushed grapes when it starts to seethe. To ferment is to “boil,” people would say confidently (“to boil” is what the word “ferment” means), but they could not begin to say how the process started or why this particular boil wasn’t hot to the touch.

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Now, any true fermento would say that, by dwelling on the links between fermentation and death, I’m being way too hard on these microbes, most of which they count as benign friends and partners. I’m trapped in a hygienic, Pasteurian perspective, they would say, in which the microbial world is regarded foremost as a mortal threat. Actually, Louis Pasteur himself held a more nuanced view of the microbes he discovered, but his legacy is a century-long war on bacteria, a war in which most of us have volunteered or been enlisted. We deploy our antibiotics and hand sanitizers and deodorants and boiling water and “pasteurization” and federal regulations to hold off the molds and bacteria and so, we hope, hold off disease and death.

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris
by Mark Honigsbaum
Published 8 Apr 2019

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the way that advances in the scientific knowledge of viruses and other infectious pathogens can blind medical researchers to these ecological and immunological insights and the epidemic lurking just around the corner. Ever since the German bacteriologist Robert Koch and his French counterpart, Louis Pasteur, inaugurated the “germ theory” of disease in the 1880s by showing that tuberculosis was a bacterial infection and manufacturing vaccines against anthrax, cholera, and rabies, scientists—and the public health officials who depend on their technologies—have dreamed of defeating the microbes of infectious disease.

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When Pfeiffer first advanced his claim for the etiological role of his bacillus, the science of bacteriology and the germ-theory paradigm (one germ, one disease) was in the ascendancy. With the invention of improved achromatic lenses and better culture-staining techniques, by the late 1880s Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur had brought a series of hitherto hard-to-detect germs into view. These included not only such landmark bacteria as the bacilli of fowl cholera and tuberculosis, but streptococcus and staphylococcus. In short order, their discoveries paved the way for the development of serums and bacterial vaccines against diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and plague, and by the eve of World War I, Avery and Cole were using the same methods to develop vaccines for pneumococcal pneumonias.

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Britain’s Royal College of Physicians concurred, arguing that there was “insufficient evidence” for Pfeiffer’s claim, though it was happy to allow that the bacillus played an important secondary role in fatal respiratory complications of influenza. In other words, the etiological role of B. influenzae might be open to question, but the bacterial paradigm was not. However, this paradigm was now facing a serious challenge from another quarter. If Koch was the German father of bacteriology, then Louis Pasteur was its French parent or, as one writer puts it, microbiology’s “lynchpin.” In his first biological paper, published in 1857 at the age of 35, Pasteur, then a relatively unknown French chemist working in Lille, boldly formulated what he called the germ theory of fermentation—namely, that each particular type of fermentation is caused by a specific kind of microbe.

Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
by Crawford, Dorothy H.
Published 27 Jul 2011

Of course, this realization did not dawn overnight, but as more and more bacteria were identified, the ‘germ theory’ took hold, and by the beginning of the 20th century it was widely accepted even in non-scientific circles that microbes could cause disease. Key to this momentous leap in understanding were technical developments in microscopes made by the Dutch lens-maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) in the 16th century. He was the first to visualize microbes, but it was not until the mid-1800s that Louis Pasteur (1822–95) working in Paris and Robert Koch (1843–1910) in Berlin carried out the ground-breaking scientific work which established ‘germs’ as the cause of infectious diseases, earning them the title ‘the founding fathers of microbiology’. Pasteur was instrumental in dispelling the general belief in ‘spontaneous generation’, that is, the generation of life from inorganic material.

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These symptoms are caused by T cells infiltrating the nerves and producing tumours in vital organs. Once the virus was isolated in 1967, it was soon discovered that a very similar virus, herpesvirus of turkeys, could protect chickens from Marek’s disease virus without ill effect. Rabies vaccination Several years after Jenner’s experiments, Louis Pasteur, working in Paris, made a vaccine against rabies virus from dried spinal cords of rabies-infected animals. This virus is present in saliva from rabid animals and generally circulates among wild animals such as dogs, foxes, and bats. Although some species can survive an attack of rabies, untreated human infections, usually acquired through the bite of a rabid dog, are 100%; fatal.

The Atlas of Disease
by Sandra Hempel
Published 15 Sep 2018

Not all parts of the New World provided a suitable environment or climate for the carrier mosquitoes, but by the nineteenth century the infection was widespread in the Mississippi Valley, the central valley of California and the coastal lowlands of northern South America. Breakthroughs in scientific research When the French chemist Louis Pasteur published his germ theory in the 1860s, scientists began to consider that an organism might be responsible for the disease. The first breakthrough came in 1880, when a French army surgeon, Alphonse Laveran, identified the parasite group that caused the infection in human beings. However, his findings were heavily contested as researchers were expecting bacteria to be responsible.

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More recent epidemics have broken out in India in the first half of the twentieth century, and in Vietnam during the war in the 1960s and 1970s. Plague is now commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, which areas now account for more than 95 per cent of reported cases. The Modern Plague though coincided with huge scientific advances in our understanding of infectious disease. Building on Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were identifying the various bacteria responsible for different diseases. In 1894, as the Modern Plague arrived in Hong Kong, the French bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin identified the organism that causes plague and explained its mode of transmission.

Tel Aviv 2015: The Retro Travel Guide
by Claudia Stein
Published 30 Mar 2015

Nowadays, it is only frequented for special events. 21) The Floating Orange (Mazal Aryé St.) At the eastern end of Mazal Aryé Street, after passing the Richter Art Gallery (No. 24), you will see this exceptional installation: an orange tree floating above the earth. With this work, the artist Ran Morin presents the fusion of nature and technology. 22) St. Georgius (1-5, Louis Pasteur St.) This Greek Orthodox church from the 19th century is located right on the border with Ajami where Christians from the Near East settled down at the end of the 19th century. 5.3.4 Ajami At the end of the 19th century, Jaffa was booming. The economy was strong and there were plans being made for a railway to Jerusalem.

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The participants are actors, musicians, dancers, acrobats in one. Lots of rhythm and visual effects flow from the stage into the audience. Founded by three Israelis, Mayumana has become so successful that they decided to have two groups: one performs in Tel Aviv and another one is always on tour. Mayúmana House, Louis Pasteur St. 15, Tel. 03-681.1787, http://www.mayumana.com, http://www.youtube.com/user/mayumanamomentum, info@mayumana.com 7.) The Clipa Theater, founded in 1995, is considered Israel’s best “visual theater”. Idit Herman and Dmitry Tyulpanov have founded a company that combines contemporary dance and musical effects in a new way and with self-designed costumes.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Also see: Rebecca Davis, “The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing and Briefly Saved Lives,” NPR Morning Edition, January 12, 2015, transcript and audio, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920 the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives?t=1577014322310. On Louis Pasteur: Louise E. Robbins, Louis Pasteur and the Hidden World of Microbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On Joseph Lister: Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Brain hemispheres and the Coke experiment: Michael S.

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He died two weeks later, at age forty-seven, from an infected wound that he got during the scuffle. His successor at the hospital’s maternity clinic discontinued the peculiar handwashing protocol. Deaths again soared. The same year that Semmelweis was locked in the asylum, a French biologist named Louis Pasteur was called in to investigate the cause of a mysterious illness that afflicted silkworms and threatened France’s silk industry. It would lead to the discovery of germs, and the new frame of “germ theory.” Around the same time, a gentleman scientist in England named Joseph Lister—baron, doctor, member of the Royal Society, mutton-chop sideburns—had been experimenting with sterilizing the bandages for wounds to reduce infections.

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
by John Abramson
Published 20 Sep 2004

Accessed August 4, 2002. 191 release enzymes that destroy the fibers: Ibid. 191 American College of Rheumatology’s: American College of Rheumatology Subcommittee on Osteoarthritis Guidelines, “Recommendations for the Medical Management of Osteoarthritis of the Hip and Knee,” Arthritis and Rheumatism 43:1905–1915, 2000. 194 Louis Pasteur accepted a position: René Dubos, Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960, p. 40. 194 bacteria, which appeared rod-shaped: Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), Zephyrus. Viewed at http://www.zephyrus.co.uk/louispasteur.html. Accessed December 16, 2003. 194 devastating the silkworm industry: Dubos, op. cit., p. 101. 194 working on a rabies vaccine: Ibid, pp. 122–123. 195 “acute and harrowing anxiety”: “Historical Perspectives: A Centennial Celebration: Pasteur and the Modern Era of Immunization,” MMWR Weekly 34:389–390, 1985. 195 Pasteur went on to treat 2490 people: Dubos, op. cit., 122–123. 195 Robert Koch: Ibid, p. 106. 195 “magic bullet”: Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of Medicine, New York: Basic Books, 1982, p. 135. 195 Johns Hopkins University: Ibid., p. 115. 196 American Medical Association in 1906: Ibid., p. 118. 196 Flexner Report: Ibid., pp 119–122. 197 Osler wrote a letter: Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, vol. 2, London: Oxford University Press, 1925, pp. 292–293. 197 Flexner himself eventually became disappointed: Starr, op. cit., p. 123. 199 one out of every 200 patients: L.

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Part of the problem is that professionals on the front lines of medicine have no reliable way to differentiate between care that is necessary and beneficial and care that has been pushed into use by financial incentives and will not stand the test of time. Much more important, however, is the template of “good medicine” that is permanently imprinted on doctors during their long years of training. Ever since Louis Pasteur discovered that bacteria cause disease, doctors have been committed to the biomedical approach to medicine: the idea that the cause and cure of every symptom and every disease can, with enough research, be understood and successfully treated at its most basic biological level. Modern scientists and doctors find this idea enormously appealing—identify the biological process that has gone awry, and fix it.

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There was plenty of time for other diagnostic tests if her symptoms did not respond to these simple measures. THE ROOTS OF THE BIOMEDICAL MODEL In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical science took a giant leap forward. Microbiology, the study of infectious microorganisms, or germs, began shortly after Louis Pasteur accepted a position as chair of the department of chemistry at the University of Lille, in the north of France. The local industry relied upon the precise harnessing of fermentation in the production of beer and wine, and the making of alcohol from beet juice. Pasteur’s work on the industrial problems associated with fermentation led to the discovery that fermentation was caused by live organisms.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

In science and mathematics, there are sometimes eureka moments, after the famous if apocryphal occasion when Archimedes jumped from his bath having discovered the principle of displacement. But even these flashes of inspiration, in which a solution suddenly reveals itself, generally come to people who have been thinking about a problem obliquely for a long time. The nineteenth-century French scientist Louis Pasteur made numerous important scientific discoveries, including that of immunization based on artificial tissue cultures. His method of discovery was oblique: Pasteur observed the effect when a botched experiment by his assistant produced unexpected results. That fortunate accident anticipated the similar obliquity of the most important of all pharmacological discoveries, that of penicillin.

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National Park System,” George Wright Forum 24, no. 3 (2007). 7 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (London, Faber & Faber, 1964), p.154. 8 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, Vintage Books, 1975), p. 11. 9 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), p. 350. 10 Louis Pasteur, 1854, quoted in Maurice B. Strauss, Familiar Medical Quotations (London: J & A Churchill, 1968), p. 108. Chapter 7: Muddling Through—Why Oblique Approaches Succeed 1 Charles Lindblom, “The Science of “Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review 19, no. 2 (1959), pp. 79–88. 2 H.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Published 31 May 2017

Bacteria had been known about for a couple of centuries, ever since a Dutch lens grinder named Antony van Leeuwenhoek passed a magnifying glass over a drop of pond water and saw that it was teeming with life, but they had been regarded as a kind of harmless ectoplasm–nobody suspected that they could make people ill. Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France made the connection, starting in the 1850s. The discoveries of these two men are too numerous to list, but among them, Koch showed that TB, the ‘Romantic’ disease of poets and artists, was not inherited–as was widely believed–but caused by a bacterium, while Pasteur disproved the notion that living organisms could be generated spontaneously from inanimate matter.

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What the Spanish flu taught us, in essence, is that another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges. PART SIX: Science Redeemed René Dujarric de la Rivière in an army laboratory, Calais, 1915 13 Aenigmoplasma influenzae In the dog days of August 1914, an ageing Ilya Mechnikov–Russian exile, Nobel laureate, ‘lieutenant’ of Louis Pasteur and mentor of Yakov Bardakh, Wu Lien-teh and others–battled his way across a Paris in the grip of mobilisation to reach the Pasteur Institute, one of the world’s leading centres for the study of infectious diseases and the production of vaccines. When he arrived, he found it under military command.

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They couldn’t see beyond the surface phenomena; now we’re able to look ‘beneath the bonnet’. (One day, science might help us to explain diseases that mystify us today for the same reason, such as autism spectrum disorder.) The revision in how we think about flu seems radical, but perhaps it isn’t as radical as all that. While observing sick silkworms in the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur made two observations: first, that la flacherie, as the worms’ disease was called (literally, ‘flaccidity’–caused by eating contaminated mulberry leaves, it gave them debilitating diarrhoea) was infectious; and second, that offspring could inherit it from their parents. In all the furore over the first observation, the second was overlooked.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton
Published 15 Mar 2013

Yet Snow recognized that the experiment was hardly decisive—for example, it might have been that one water company might have served only well-to-do patrons, who were protected for other reasons—and went to great pains to rule out other potential explanations for his results.29 Snow’s findings, together with the later work of Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France, helped establish the germ theory of disease, albeit with much resistance from holdout believers in miasma theory. One sticking point was why some people exposed to the disease did not become sick—a serious challenge to causality and understanding.30 Indeed, Koch, who had isolated Vibrio cholerae in 1883, proposed four “postulates,” all of which had to be satisfied if a microbe were to be safely identified as the cause of a disease.

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The germ theory itself led to the identification of a range of causative microorganisms, including the bacteria for anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera in Koch’s laboratories in Germany. Koch was one of the founders of the then new field of microbiology, and his pupils went on to identify the microorganisms responsible for many diseases, including typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and bubonic plague. In the next wave of discovery, Louis Pasteur in Paris demonstrated that microorganisms were responsible for the spoiling of milk and showed how to “pasteurize” milk to prevent it. Pasteur also showed how attenuated versions of infectious microorganisms could be used to develop a range of vaccines. (He also invented Marmite, a basic foodstuff without which life would be impossible for contemporary Britons; we shall meet it again in Chapter 6.)

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Even when all the prices are available, people spend their money on different things and in different proportions in different countries. One example will be familiar to anyone—like me—who was brought up in Britain and who now lives elsewhere. One of the basic necessities of existence for Brits is a product called Marmite. This is a (very) salty yeast extract that is a by-product of brewing, originally discovered by Louis Pasteur, who in turn licensed it to a British beer manufacturer. In Britain, Marmite is cheap and widely consumed; it comes in large black pots. In the United States, where I now live, Marmite is available, but it is expensive and comes in very small black pots. Marmite is a well-defined and precisely comparable item that is easily priced in both the United States and Britain.

Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love
by Simran Sethi
Published 10 Nov 2015

(It explains why many have revised a statement Ben Franklin made about wine to “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”12) In order to make beer, people used to backslop the brew—transferring “Goddisgoode” from one fermentation into subsequent batches—hoping God would take care and make a good drink.13 In 1860, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered specific organisms were involved in fermentation, defying conventional wisdom that fermentation was the by-product of the life and death of cells. He, instead, directly linked fermentation to a live organism—yeast. Two decades later, fungus specialist Emil Christian Hansen, working in the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark, found these yeasts were not one, but many, kinds of fungi.14 By isolating a single strain, combining it with sugars and growing more in his laboratory, Hansen produced a pure culture and revolutionized how brewers made beer.

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He removed the unpredictability of wild yeast and turned the mystery of fermentation into a replicable, scientific process—one brewers could rely on with or without godly intervention. Saccharomyces, yeast’s scientific classification, literally means “sugar fungus.” The yeast Hansen isolated was called Saccharomyces carlsbergensis (but was later reclassified as Saccharomyces pastorianus in honor of Louis Pasteur) and is still used in beers today.15 These fermentation yeasts were some of the first microbes ever identified, isolated and cultivated. In 1966, Saccharomyces cerevisiae—the species of yeast used for brewing and baking—was the first organism with a nucleus to have its genome completely sequenced.

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At its height in the 1850s, Truman’s brewed nine different porters and stouts. It exported beer to the West Indies, North America and Australia, and housed a stable of 200 horses for local deliveries.28 Truman’s was the first British brewery known to have employed a chemist—two decades before Louis Pasteur identified the role of yeast in fermentation.29 However, despite its popularity, beer drinkers’ tastes evolved and, by the 1970s, Truman’s beers started to fall out of favor. “Sadly, the jokes were no longer about the ability of Truman’s beers to put you on the floor. Instead drinkers were asking what the difference was between Ben Truman and a dead frog, and giving the answer: ‘There are more hops in a dead frog.’”30 In 1977, the company tried to catch up to a market that had grown to prefer imported lagers, but their new formulations (featuring different yeasts, malts and hops) never really took hold.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

But published statistics revealed that the rate had risen more than sixfold, from o.3 per million, in only fifteen years. Expanded shipping was transferring rabid animals to and from the New World and Asia. Rabid dogs were even more frightening in growing cities than they had been in the countryside. Louis Pasteur's controversial trials of human rabies vaccine in 1885 and his successful vaccination of thousands of exposed individuals showed how well the specificity of medicine could be mobilized in a crisis. Pasteur had identified the virus responsible for rabies, as well as the sites of the disease, the brain and nervous system.

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Like the almost-contemporary Irish potato blight, this was a revenge effect in its own right, a serious problem that a lack of genetic diversity allowed to become a devastating one. France lost five-sixths of its silk output. Production had soared from about 350,000 kilograms in 1805 to over 2.1 million in the early 185os, only to drop again to its 1805 level by 1865. Louis Pasteur's investigations of the two diseases ravaging the silkworms were models of the analysis of parasitism, but even his program for recovery through systematic selection of healthy silkworms left French output at less than half its high point. There seemed to be a boundless opportunity for creating new silk industries, with healthier insects, elsewhere.' 4 By the time Trouvelot began his experiments with moths, every attempt to start producing raw silk in the United States had failed in the long run.

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Potatoes, a great benefit for the European popular diet, were genetically vulnerable when grown from a single strain and used as a primary source of nutrition by the very poor. Yet terrible as the Irish potato famine of the 184os was, nothing like it has recurred. The crash of the French raw silk industry in the 185os, so important for Louis Pasteur's career, also showed how dangerous it could be for so many families to link their economic fate to a single organism. It is curious how many resource-rich nations and regions have faltered because they relied too strongly on exploiting only one or two sources of natural wealth. The Mississippi delta, the deserted mining towns of the Rockies, and the desolate coal patches of the Pennsylvania anthracite country all have their counterparts overseas: Sicily, the Ukraine, and Argentina as former world breadbaskets, Romania and Azerbaijan as fabled energy reserves, Zaire and Siberia as gold vaults, the Ruhr as ironworks.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

With that river providing much of the city’s supply of drinking water, Chadwick’s solution only made the problem worse.28 It was not until the episode of the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858, mentioned in Chapter 4, that parliament decided to take decisive action to clean up the river itself. A major programme of upgrading London’s sewerage system was initiated, with waste being pumped downriver of the city’s water intake and flushed out to sea, freeing the city from its periodic cholera outbreaks.29 It would ultimately take the diligent scientific efforts of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch for the germ theory of disease to finally supplant the miasma theory. Their discoveries led not only to efforts by cities around the world to clean up their water supplies, but also to the adoption of basic hygiene practices we now take for granted – like washing hands or cleaning medical implements after use – that play a crucial role in preventing disease transmission.

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Inoculation against smallpox became commonplace in Europe early in the nineteenth century after an English country doctor named Edward Jenner discovered that infecting a patient with the far less dangerous cowpox conferred immunity against smallpox. It was not, however, until the late nineteenth century that Louis Pasteur was able to apply the insights of germ theory to create a more systematic approach for weakening bacteria and viruses to make them suitable for inoculations against a wide variety of diseases. Likewise, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics would never have been possible without germ theory.

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
by Gary Greenberg
Published 1 May 2013

In the nineteenth century, most doctors still believed that humoral imbalances caused disease. Before John Snow20 could persuade the local government to close the infected well that caused the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, he had to overcome the common idea that the disease was carried by a miasma, bad air that could upset humoral balance. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch21 had to work hard to convince their colleagues that germs caused diseases like rabies and anthrax, and that they (the germs, not the colleagues) could be targeted and killed. As the microscope and the chemical assay provided incontrovertible evidence of germs and their destruction, doctors were won over to the germ theory, and soon it seemed that they had begun to fulfill Socrates’ dictum to find the natural joints that separated our ills from one another.

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So there was really no reason to doubt that patients with genital sores were suffering from a disease different from what patients with a skin rash had, and patients with general paresis, a form of dementia, had yet another illness. There wasn’t even a reason to think that this scheme was based on any a priori principle, that it was anything other than a faithful account of how nature itself sorted diseases. That all changed when some doctors, notably Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, began to insist that there was more to disease than met the unaided eye. Beneath the appearances, the pustules and the fevers and the complaints, was a microbial world populated by the real sources of illness. And if the detectable presence of viruses and bacteria was not convincing enough, the successes of pasteurization and anthrax inoculations soon had doctors abandoning those first principles and peering into microscopes to find the germs that caused diseases.

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There are nine symptoms of depression, but patients need have only five in any combination to earn the diagnosis. 18. “another [of] the ten thousand”: Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities,” Part 1, 336. 19. “Love is a madness”: Plato, Phaedrus, 265e. 20. Before John Snow: The best account of this famous story is probably Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. 21. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch: Ullmann, “Pasteur–Koch.” 22. “blessed rage to order”: Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” The Palm at the End of the Mind. 23. Adam and Eve: Genesis 2:19–21. 24. “loose, baggy monster”: Henry James, The Tragic Muse, 4. 25. “insomnia, flushing, drowsiness”: Beard, American Nervousness, 7–8. 26.

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen
Published 16 Oct 2017

In the seventeenth century, an Italian scholar named Ramazzini claimed, “It seems as if the phlebotomist [bloodletter] grasped the Delphic Sword in his hand to exterminate the innocent.” By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opposition from many physicians and scientists began to turn the tide of change. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch showed that inflammation came from infection and wouldn’t be cured with bloodletting. In 1855, John Hughes Bennett, a physician from Edinburgh, used statistics to show that pneumonia mortality decreased as bloodletting declined. With the current understanding of human physiology and pathology, medical practices in the West began to move away from the antiquated ideas of humoral medicine.

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When the students switched wards, the horrible death rates followed the medical students and their bacteria-laden hands. The physician Ignaz Semmelweis, observing this, had the staff do something simple but miraculous: wash their hands with soap and a chlorine solution. Voilà—death rates plummeted. But tragically, no one listened. In the nineteenth century, Joseph Lister built upon microbiologist Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease and eventually revolutionized surgery by introducing the concept of antisepsis. Many poo-pooed the idea of bacteria. An Edinburgh professor snorted, “Where are these little beasts . . . has anyone seen them yet?” Another surgeon insisted that “there is good reason to believe that the theory of M.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

Our success in finding new information and sources of inspiration increasingly depends upon serendipity—the chance encounter with someone or something that we did not even know existed, much less had value, but that proves to be extraordinarily relevant and helpful once we find out about it. But it turns out that these “serendipitous” events are not always just chance. Louis Pasteur famously observed, “Fortune favors the prepared mind,” but this still assumes that the initial encounter is pure luck and that it is only a question of being prepared for luck when it happens. What if it is possible to shape those unexpected encounters so that we could increase the probability and quality of the encounters?

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By phoning up the videographer beforehand, as Dusty did, even if we don’t know what good might come from it; by moving to Silicon Valley or some other spike of complementary talent; by being appropriately open with our personal and professional information on social networking sites—in all these ways we can enhance the potential for attracting serendipitous encounters. In other words, we can shape serendipity rather than waiting passively for it to occur. Following Louis Pasteur’s advice, we can work to prepare ourselves. We can reach out, make interesting connections—often for their own sake. But doing this requires an understanding of the areas where the most valuable new ideas, insights, and experiences are likely to surface so that we can position ourselves for serendipity.

Alcohol: A History
by Rod Phillips
Published 14 Oct 2014

So at least 9,000 years ago—but almost certainly much earlier—a human history of alcohol was added to the natural history of spontaneous fermentations in rotting fruits and berries. It began when the first winemaker or brewer crushed grapes or other fruit, or processed barley or another cereal, and let the liquid stand until it fermented. Fermentation was not explained as a biological process until the middle of the nineteenth century, when French scientist Louis Pasteur carried out his experiments with wine. Yet thousands of years earlier, someone, somewhere—northeastern China and western Asia are currently considered the most likely locations—seems to have made a historic observation: if the juice of fruit or berries (or a mixture of water and honey or processed cereal) were left for a short time in warm enough conditions, it began to bubble or froth.

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In other words, when “wine” was associated with good things in the Bible, it was grape juice, but when “wine” was associated with immorality, it was wine. As they felt it would be blasphemous to represent Christ by wine, teetotalers began a campaign to persuade churches to replace communion wine with grape juice. A structural development assisted the teetotalers in this endeavor. Louis Pasteur and other scientists who carried out research on fermentation discovered that heating up grape juice (the process later known as pasteurization) killed off the yeasts needed to turn its sugars into alcohol. This enabled the production of a stable juice that was free from the risk of fermentation.

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No sector of the population that was perceived as able to drink more wine was spared the attention of the campaign. Young men would learn wine-drinking while they did military service. Over the objections of some teachers’ groups—and, of course, temperance associations—the campaign even reached into France’s schools. When children took dictation, they would copy out Louis Pasteur’s dicta on the health benefits of wine, and when they took geography lessons, they would learn the location of France’s wine regions. Mathematics classes included equations such as “One liter of wine at ten degrees [alcohol-level] corresponds as a food-stuff to 900 grams of milk, 370 grams of bread, 585 grams of meat, and five eggs.”

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

The infrastructure and design of this network of networks do play a certain role in sanctioning many of these myths—for example, the idea that “the Internet” is resistant to censorship comes from the unique qualities of its packet-switching communication mechanism—but “the Internet” that is the bane of public debates also contains many other stories and narratives—about innovation, surveillance, capitalism—that have little to do with the infrastructure per se. French philosopher Bruno Latour, writing of Louis Pasteur’s famed scientific accomplishments, distinguished between Pasteur, the actual historical figure, and “Pasteur,” the mythical almighty character who has come to represent the work of other scientists and entire social movements, like the hygienists, who, for their own pragmatic reasons, embraced Pasteur with open arms.

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French philosopher Bruno Latour, writing of Louis Pasteur’s famed scientific accomplishments, distinguished between Pasteur, the actual historical figure, and “Pasteur,” the mythical almighty character who has come to represent the work of other scientists and entire social movements, like the hygienists, who, for their own pragmatic reasons, embraced Pasteur with open arms. But anyone interested in writing the history of that period cannot just deploy the name “Pasteur” as an unproblematic, objective term; it needs to be disassembled so that its various parts can be studied in their own right. The story of how these disparate parts—including the actual Louis Pasteur—have become “Pasteur,” the national hero of France whom we see in textbooks, is what the history of science, at least in its Latourian vision, should aspire to uncover. Now, I do not set out to write history in this book. If I did, I would indeed try to show the contingency and fluidity of the very idea of “the Internet” and attempt to trace how “the Internet” has come to mean what it means today.

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Having closely studied evidence for all four of these changes, Worboys concludes that “historians have read into the 1880s changes that occurred over a much longer period, and that while there were significant shifts in ideas and practices over the decade, the balance of continuities and changes was quite uneven across medicine.” Note that Worboys doesn’t deny the importance of contributions made by Robert Koch or Louis Pasteur (well, “Pasteur” is probably more like it)—he just points out that the actual way in which these discoveries transformed the medical practice was much more convoluted; it was anything but predetermined or inevitable. Such subtle accounts that seek to acknowledge important changes without falling into the epochalist mode are very hard to find in Internet studies.

The Billion-Dollar Molecule
by Barry Werth

None of the organs functioned for more than a few hours, and the patients all died within days. Nature, it appeared, abhorred the fusion of animal parts as much as the Greeks did. Though none of the organ recipients lived long enough to reject their grafts, the search for the biological barrier to transplantation focused on the immune system. Ever since the 1870s, when Louis Pasteur first showed that invading germs provoked specific defensive chemical responses in the body, scientific immunology had been on the rise. In the 1890s, Pasteur’s work was advanced spectacularly by another chemist-turned-biologist, Paul Ehrlich. Studying how dyes bind to wool, Ehrlich ushered biology from the level to which Pasteur had brought it—the cell—to its ultimate arena: molecules.

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Schreiber, infused with ambition, resolved to fulfill the terms of his own rise by launching himself anew. • • • Crossing into deeper scientific waters, Schreiber was emulating perhaps the noblest fraternity in science: those apostates who have departed, and exceeded, their host disciplines by plumbing what French microbiologist Louis Pasteur called “the mysteries of life and death.” Ehrlich, Pauling—both had been chemists before the lure of biology drew them to cross the double-yellow separating academic fields. Pasteur himself was a chemist and avid crystal grower when, as a consultant to the French wine industry in Strasbourg in the 1850s, his studies in fermentation led him to discover microbes: He later posed—and proved—the germ theory of disease, ushering medicine into the modern age.

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Conant, J. B. 1970. My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor. New York: Harper and Row. Crosby, A. W., Jr. 1976. Epidemic and Peace, 1918. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Dolphin, D. 1977. Robert Burns Woodward: Three Score Years and Then? Aldrichimica Acta 10, No. 1, 3-9. DuBos, R. J. 1950. Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science. Boston: Little, Brown. Engle, L. 1951. Cortisone and Plenty of It. Harper’s 203, 56-62. Epstein, S., and B. Williams. 1956. Miracles from Microbes: The Road to Streptomycin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Galdston, I. 1943. Behind the Sulfa Drugs: A Short History of Chemotherapy.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

Sure, it was totally bootstrapped—our campus borrowed, our faculty on loan (made up of the professors Bob, Todd and I recruited and borrowed from our respective alma maters). Yet it was still a complete success Then we did it again, changing only the location (so we could create engagement in wider and wider communities). During that second summer, ISU borrowed the Université Louis Pasteur campus in Strasbourg, France. Then we were off to Toronto, Canada, in 1990, Toulouse, France, in 1991, and Kitakyushu, Japan, in 1992. After the university had five years and about 550 alumni under its belt, we finally decided to try and parlay our assets into step 4 of our vision—a permanent terrestrial campus.

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R., 27 LIDAR, 43–44, 44 life-extension projects, 66, 81 Li’l Abner (comic strip), 71 Lincoln, Abraham, 109, 194 Lindbergh, Charles, 112, 244, 245, 259–60 linear growth, 7, 9 linear industries, 38, 116 exponential technologies in disrupting of, 17, 18–22 linear organizations, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 76, 85, 116 LinkedIn, 77, 213, 231 Lintott, Chris, 220 Linux, 11, 163 Littler Workplace Policy Institute, 60 live-streaming, in crowdsourcing campaigns, 207 Lloyd, Gareth, 4 Local Motors, 33, 217, 223–25, 231, 238, 240, 241 Locke, Edwin, 23, 74, 75, 103 Lockheed, 71–72, 75 Lockheed Martin, 249 Longitude Prize, 245, 247, 267 long-term thinking, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Los Angeles, Calif., 258 loss aversion, 121 Louis Pasteur Université, 104 Lovins, Amory, 222 MacCready, Paul, 263 McDowell, Mike, 291n machine learning, 54–55, 58, 66, 85, 137, 167, 216 see also artificial intelligence (AI) Macintosh computer, 72 McKinsey & Company, 245 McLucas, John, 102 Macondo Prospect, 250 macrotasks, crowdsourcing of, 156, 157–58 Made in Space, 36–37 Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Heath and Heath), 248 MakerBot printers, 39 Makers (Doctorow), 38 MakieLabs, 39 manufacturing, 33, 41 biological, 63–64 digital, 33 in DIY communities, 223–25 robotics in, 62 subtractive vs. additive, 29–30, 31 3–D printing’s impact on, 30, 31, 34–35 Marines, US, 222 Markoff, John, 56 Mars missions, 99, 118–19, 128 Mars Oasis project, 118 Maryland, University of, 74 Maryniak, Gregg, 244 Mashable, 238 massively transformative purpose (MTP), 215, 221, 230, 231, 233, 240, 242, 274 in incentive competitions, 249, 255, 263, 265, 270 mastery, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92 materials, in crowdfunding campaigns, 195 Maven Research, 145 Maxwell, John, 114n Mead, Margaret, 247 Mechanical Turk, 157 meet-ups, 237 Menlo Ventures, 174 message boards, 164 Mexican entrepreneurs, 257–58 Michigan, University of, 135, 136 microfactories, 224, 225 microlending, 172 microprocessors, 49, 49 Microsoft, 47, 50, 99 Microsoft Windows, 27 Microsoft Word, 11 microtasks, crowdsourcing of, 156–57, 166 Mightybell, 217, 233 Migicovsky, Eric, 175–78, 186, 191, 193, 198, 199, 200, 206, 209 Millington, Richard, 233 Mims, Christopher, 290n MIT, 27, 60, 100, 101, 103, 291n mobile devices, 14, 42, 42, 46, 46, 47, 49, 124, 125, 135, 146, 163, 176 see also smartphones Modernizing Medicine, 57 monetization: in incentive competitions, 263 of online communities, 241–42 Montessori education, 89 moonshot goals, 81–83, 93, 98, 103, 104, 110, 245, 248 Moore, Gordon, 7 Moore’s Law, 6–7, 9, 12, 31, 64 Mophie, 18 moral leadership, 274–76 Morgan Stanley, 122, 132 Mosaic, 27, 32, 33, 57 motivation, science of, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Murphy’s Law, 107–8 Museum of Flight (Seattle), 205 music industry, 11, 20, 124, 125, 127, 161 Musk, Elon, xiii, 73, 97, 111, 115, 117–23, 128, 134, 138, 139, 167, 223 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 119–23, 127 Mycoskie, Blake, 80 Mycroft, Frank, 180 MySQL, 163 Napoléon I, Emperor of France, 245 Napster, 11 Narrative Science, 56 narrow framing, 121 NASA, 96, 97, 100, 102, 110, 123, 221, 228, 244 Ames Research Center of, 58 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of, 99 Mars missions of, 99, 118 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 226 National Institutes of Health, 64, 227 National Press Club, 251 navigation, in online communities, 232 Navteq, 47 Navy Department, US, 72 NEAR Shoemaker mission, 97 Netflix, 254, 255 Netflix Prize, 254–56 Netscape, 117, 143 networks and sensors, x, 14, 21, 24, 41–48, 42, 45, 46, 66, 275 information garnered by, 42–43, 44, 47, 256 in robotics, 60, 61 newcomer rituals, 234 Newman, Tom, 268 New York Times, xii, 56, 108, 133, 145, 150, 155, 220 Nickell, Jake, 143, 144 99designs, 145, 158, 166, 195 Nivi, Babak, 174 Nokia, 47 Nordstrom, 72 Nye, Bill, 180, 200, 207 “Oatmeal, the” (web comic), 178, 179, 193, 196, 200 Oculus Rift, 182 O’Dell, Jolie, 238–39 oil-cleanup projects, 247, 250–53, 262, 263, 264 Olguin, Carlos, 65 1Qbit, 59 operational assets, crowdsourcing of, 158–60 Orteig Prize, 244, 245, 259, 260, 263 Oxford Martin School, 62 Page, Carl, 135 Page, Gloria, 135 Page, Larry, xiii, 53, 74, 81, 84, 99, 100, 115, 126, 128, 134–39, 146 thinking-at-scale strategies of, 136–38 PageRank algorithm, 135 parabolic flights, 110–12, 123 Paramount Pictures, 151 Parliament, British, 245 passion, importance of, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 180, 183, 184, 248, 249 in online communities, 224, 225, 228, 231, 258 PayPal, 97, 117–18, 167, 201 PC Tools, 150 Pebble Watch campaign, 174, 175–78, 179, 182, 186, 187, 191, 200, 206, 208, 209, 210 pitch video in, 177, 198, 199 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 172 Pelton, Joseph, 102 personal computers (PCs), 26, 76 Peter’s Laws, 108–14 PHD Comics, 200 philanthropic prizes, 267 photography, 3–6, 10, 15 demonetization of, 12, 15 see also digital cameras; Kodak Corporation Pink, Daniel, 79 Pishevar, Shervin, 174 pitch videos, 177, 180, 192, 193, 195, 198–99, 203, 212 Pivot Power, 19 Pixar, 89, 111 Planetary Resources, Inc., 34, 95, 96, 99, 109, 172, 175, 179, 180, 186, 189–90, 193, 195, 201–3, 221, 228, 230 Planetary Society, 190, 200 Planetary Vanguards, 180, 201–3, 212, 230 PlanetLabs, 286n +Pool, 171 Polaroid, 5 Polymath Project, 145 Potter, Gavin, 255–56 premium memberships, 242 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 146 Prime Movers, The (Locke), 23 Princeton University, 128–29, 222 Prius, 221 probabilistic thinking, 116, 121–22, 129 process optimization, 48 Project Cyborg, 65 psychological tools, of entrepreneurs, 67, 115, 274 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 93, 103–4, 112, 137, 185–87 importance of, 73 line of super-credibility and, 96, 98–99, 98, 100, 101–2, 107, 190, 203, 266, 272 passion as important in, 106–7, 113, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134, 174, 249, 258 Peter’s Laws in, 108–14 and power of constraints, 248–49 rapid iteration and, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 120, 126, 133–34, 236 risk management and, see risk management science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103, 254, 255 in skunk methodology, 71–87, 88; see also skunk methodology staging of bold ideas and, 103–4, 107 for thinking at scale, see scale, thinking at triggering flow and, 85–94, 109 public relations managers, in crowdfunding campaigns, 193–94 purpose, 79, 85, 87, 116, 119–20 in DIY communities, see massively transformative purpose (MTP) Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, 253 Quirky, 18–20, 21, 66, 161 Rackspace, 50, 257 Rally Fighter, 224, 225 rapid iteration, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86, 236 feedback loops in, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90–91, 92, 120 in thinking at scale, 116, 126, 133–34 rating systems, 226, 232, 236–37, 240 rationally optimistic thinking, 116, 136–37 Ravikant, Naval, 174 Raytheon, 72 re:Invent 2012, 76–77 reCAPTCHA, 154–55, 156, 157 registration, in online communities, 232 Reichental, Avi, 30–32, 35 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 4 reputation economics, 217–19, 230, 232, 236–37 Ressi, Adeo, 118 ReverbNation, 161 reward-based crowdfunding, 173, 174–80, 183, 185, 186–87, 195, 205, 207 case studies in, 174–80 designing right incentives for affiliates in, 200 early donor engagement in, 203–5 fundraising targets in, 186–87, 191 setting of incentives in, 189–91, 189 telling meaningful story in, 196–98 trend surfing in, 208 upselling in, 207, 208–9 see also crowdfunding, crowdfunding campaigns rewards, extrinsic vs. intrinsic, 78–79 Rhodin, Michael, 56 Richards, Bob, 100, 101–2, 103, 104 Ridley, Matt, 137 risk management, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 103, 109, 116, 121 Branson’s strategies for, 126–27 flow and, 87, 88, 92, 93 incentive competitions and, 247, 248–49, 261, 270 in thinking at scale, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Robinson, Mark, 144 Robot Garden, 62 robotics, x, 22, 24, 35, 41, 59–62, 63, 66, 81, 135, 139 entrepreneurial opportunities in, 60, 61, 62 user interfaces in, 60–61 Robot Launchpad, 62 RocketHub, 173, 175, 184 Rogers, John “Jay,” 33, 38, 222–25, 231, 238, 240 Roomba, 60, 66 Rose, Geordie, 58 Rose, Kevin, 120 Rosedale, Philip, 144 Russian Federal Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 76, 96, 112, 127, 269 San Antonio Mix Challenge, 257–58 Sandberg, Sheryl, 217, 237 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 3 Sasson, Steven, 4–5, 5, 6, 9 satellite technology, 14, 36–37, 44, 100, 127, 275, 286n scale, thinking at, xiii, 20–21, 116, 119, 125–28, 148, 225, 228, 243, 257 Bezos’s strategies for, 128, 129, 130–33 Branson’s strategies for, 125–27 in building online communities, 232–33 customer-centric approach in, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131–32, 133 first principles in, 116, 120–21, 122, 126, 138 long-term thinking and, 116, 128, 130–31, 132–33, 138 Musk’s strategies for, 119–23, 127 Page’s strategies for, 136–38 passion and purpose in, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 134 probabilistic thinking and, 116, 121–22, 129 rapid iteration in, 116, 126, 133–34 rationally optimistic thinking and, 116, 136–37 risk management in, 116, 121–22, 126–27, 137 Scaled Composites, 262 Schawinski, Kevin, 219–21 Schmidt, Eric, 99, 128, 251 Schmidt, Wendy, 251, 253 Schmidt Family Foundation, 251 science of motivation, 78–80, 85, 87, 92, 103 incentive competitions and, 148, 254, 255, 262–63 Screw It, Let’s Do It (Branson), 125 Scriptlance, 149 Sealed Air Corporation, 30–31 Second Life, 144 SecondMarket, 174 “secrets of skunk,” see skunk methodology Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), US, 172 security-related sensors, 43 sensors, see networks and sensors Shapeways.com, 38 Shingles, Marcus, 159, 245, 274–75 Shirky, Clay, 215 ShotSpotter, 43 Simply Music, 258 Singh, Narinder, 228 Singularity University (SU), xi, xii, xiv, 15, 35, 37, 53, 61, 73, 81, 85, 136, 169, 278, 279 Six Ds of Exponentials, 7–15, 8, 17, 20, 25 deception phase in, 8, 9, 10, 24, 25–26, 29, 30, 31, 41, 59, 60 dematerialization in, 8, 10, 11–13, 14, 15, 20–21, 66 democratization in, 8, 10, 13–15, 21, 33, 51–52, 59, 64–65, 276 demonetization in, 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 52, 64–65, 138, 163, 167, 223 digitalization in, 8–9, 10 disruption phase in, 8, 9–10, 20, 24, 25, 29, 32, 33–35, 37, 38, 39, 256; see also disruption, exponential Skonk Works, 71, 72 skunk methodology, 71–87, 88 goal setting in, 74–75, 78, 79, 80, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 103 Google’s use of, 81–84 isolation in, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81–82, 257 “Kelly’s rules” in, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 84, 247 rapid iteration approach in, 76, 77, 78, 79–80, 83–84, 85, 86 risk management in, 76–77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88 science of motivation and, 78–80, 85, 87, 92 triggering flow with, 86, 87 Skunk Works, 72, 75 Skybox, 286n Skype, 11, 13, 167 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 219–20 Small Business Association, US, 169 smartphones, x, 7, 12, 14, 15, 42, 135, 283n apps for, 13, 13, 15, 16, 28, 47, 176 information gathering with, 47 SmartThings, 48 smartwatches, 176–77, 178, 191, 208 software development, 77, 144, 158, 159, 161, 236 in exponential communities, 225–28 SolarCity, 111, 117, 119, 120, 122 Space Adventures Limited, 96, 291n space exploration, 81, 96, 97–100, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 134, 139, 230, 244 asteroid mining in, 95–96, 97–99, 107, 109, 179, 221, 276 classifying of galaxies and, 219–21, 228 commercial tourism projects in, 96–97, 109, 115, 119, 125, 127, 244, 246, 261, 268 crowdfunding campaigns for, see ARKYD Space Telescope campaign incentive competitions in, 76, 96, 109, 112, 115, 127, 134, 139, 246, 248–49, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 International Space University and, 96, 100–104, 107–8 Mars missions in, 99, 118–19, 128 see also aerospace industry Space Fair, 291n “space selfie,” 180, 189–90, 196, 208 SpaceShipOne, 96, 97, 127, 269 SpaceShipTwo, 96–97 SpaceX, 34, 111, 117, 119, 122, 123 Speed Stick, 152, 154 Spiner, Brent, 180, 200, 207 Spirit of St.

Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome
by Will Bulsiewicz
Published 15 Dec 2020

Modernization and the origins of modern epidemics In the late nineteenth century the average life expectancy was just forty-seven years and the top causes of death were infections. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, typhus, and syphilis were rampant. Heart disease and cancer were there, but a small problem compared to infections. Thanks to Louis Pasteur’s discovery of what we now call modern germ theory, we finally understood that behind the top causes of death is a germ. In response, bacteria became public enemy numbers one, two, and three. So what are you going to do about it? Well, we did what humans have always done at every stage of human history—we innovated to find a solution to the problem in front of us.

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It was tangy and acidic, too—and delicious. I took more bites. Many more. I was in fermented nirvana. It’s been a daily part of my life ever since. The bacterial artistry behind fermentation and healthy soil Perhaps you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about food decomposition, but this is exactly what Louis Pasteur was thinking about when he discovered modern germ theory in the 1860s. By studying how wine is created from grapes and how milk spoils, he started to understand that microorganisms are at the heart of all of it. Understanding the process of food decomposition is an important part of assessing the nutritional value of our food.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat
by Bee Wilson
Published 14 Sep 2012

No wonder it was hard work: the work of the stillroom was a kind of magic, a staving off of decay comparable to the embalming of the dead. The most remarkable thing about fruit preserves was the fact that they really did preserve the fruit (at least, most of the time). Throughout history, cooks have aimed to make food safe to eat; and often, they succeeded. Yet until the 1860s, when Louis Pasteur uncovered the microorganisms responsible for spoiling food and drink, cooks had no real knowledge of why food preservation worked. The prevailing view was that decomposition was caused by spontaneous generation, in other words, that mysterious unseen forces caused the mold to grow. People knew nothing of microbes, the living organisms—fungi, bacteria, and yeasts, among others—that cause beneficial fermentation in wine and cheese, and toxic fermentation when food degrades.

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In 1852, thousands of cans of meat supplied to the British navy were inspected and found to be unfit to eat, “their contents being masses of putrefaction” causing a dreadful “stench” when opened. It was generally assumed that canned meat spoiled because “air has penetrated into the canister, or was not originally entirely exhausted.” Until Louis Pasteur, it wasn’t known that there is a class of microbe that can flourish without air: to kill these, the crucial factor is thorough heating. The original size of cans had been around 2 to 4 pounds (as against ¼ to 1 pound for average cans today); these navy cans were massive, holding on average 10 pounds of meat.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Indeed, these exceptions are often the most momentous discoveries in science.’ History is, of course, littered with mavericks initially ridiculed or dismissed and later (sometimes much later) accepted as geniuses: including Charles Darwin (evolution), Gregor Mendel (genetic inheritance), Robert Goddard (liquid-fuelled rockets), Louis Pasteur (germ theory) and the Wright brothers (powered flight). Then again, the past is also full of challenges to accepted wisdom which crashed and burned. I give you James McConnell and Georges Ungar, who believed that memories were encoded in molecules and could therefore be transferred from one animal to another – giving rise to the possibility that you could take a pill and go on to recall the complete works of Shakespeare.

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A final motivation for collecting all this genomic data is similar to the reason chefs buy lots of cookbooks – to add to their repertoire of dishes and get ideas for how to cook new ones. The next day I head to the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in the Fenway area of Boston. It’s a slightly oppressive slab of glass and concrete, sited, appropriately, on Avenue Louis Pasteur – named after the iconic Frenchman who gave us pasteurised milk as well as the experiments that would prove to the world that diseases could be caused by ‘germs’ (critters like the bacteria and viruses that George Church’s work has helped unmask and force to give up their genetic secrets). As I approach I’m assaulted by a plethora of signs that announce, sombrely and rather patronisingly, ‘Let’s Be Clear.

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon
Published 1 Oct 2018

No one believed, however, that something as simple as washing your hands could make the difference between life and death and Semmelweis was dismissed as mad. (It did not help that he unfortunately suffered from a neurological disorder that was gradually driving him insane.) Semmelweis’s basic principle of hygiene was not accepted until Louis Pasteur exposed bacteria as the cause of disease and Joseph Lister was the first, in 1865, to prevent the infection of a surgical wound by using an antiseptic. Though revolutionary, these methods were, initially, very painful, because of the corrosive effect of disinfectant in the wound and the length of time they took to administer.

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After Pedoux was discharged, Péan did not see his patient at all for another year. This is in itself remarkable – that a renowned surgeon would allow a simple baker to walk off with an upper arm full of platinum (though this precious metal was not considered very valuable at that time). Why was he so optimistic about this shoulder prosthesis? Louis Pasteur had already proved thirty years earlier that bacteria were responsible for causing diseases and, ten years earlier, Robert Koch had discovered the bacillus that caused tuberculosis. And yet, Péan could not have known much about the mechanism the human body employs to defend itself against intruding bacteria.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

He preserved a whole sheep in a crock just to show it off. His solution preserved nutrients so well that scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency known as “the sailor’s nightmare,” went from deadly curse to avoidable nuisance. The main scientific epiphany—heat kills microbes—was still sixty years from being discovered by Louis Pasteur. Appert’s method revolutionized public health, and, unfortunately for Napoleon, crossed the English Channel. In 1815, it fed the English troops at Waterloo. Alph Bingham’s critics were aware that clever outsiders and dilettantes had made technical breakthroughs in the past, but they assumed it was purely that, an artifact of the past that would not translate into the era of hyperspecialization.

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If a title did not directly pertain to the creation of a new commercial technology, she whisked it from the stack and asked the room how exactly that sort of thing would help the country get ahead of India and China. Among the disciplines Hutchison classified as distracting from technological innovation were biology, geology, economics, and archaeology. One can only guess how she would have assessed the work of Louis Pasteur (who started as an artist) on chickens with cholera, which led him to lab-created vaccines. Or Einstein’s fanciful idea to investigate if time passes differently in high versus low gravity, part of a theory essential to some rather useful technology, like cell phones, which use global positioning satellites with gravitationally adjusted clocks that sync with clocks on Earth.

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
Published 4 May 2015

The mere notion that doctors could be responsible for bringing death, not life, to their patients caused huge offence, and Semmelweis was cast out of the establishment. Women continued to risk their lives giving birth for decades, as they paid the price of the doctors’ arrogance. Twenty years later, the great Frenchman Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, which attributed infection and illness to microbes, not miasma. In 1884, Pasteur’s theory was proved by the elegant experiments of the German Nobel prize-winning doctor Robert Koch. By this time, Semmelweis was long dead. He had become obsessed by childbed fever, and had gone mad with rage and desperation.

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Far be it from me to critique the degree of adherence to the scientific method of a Nobel prize-winner, but Metchnikoff’s dabblings in intestinal microbiology, in this book at least, barely met reasonable standards of repeatability, comparison against a control, or concerns of causation. His scientific coming-of-age coincided with a period of history in which medical scientists were overcome with excitement about the research avenues opened up by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. Hypotheses thrived, and little time or mental energy was devoted to patient study, experimentation or evidence-building before the new cohort of medical microbiologists bounded off, tails wagging, to sniff out new ideas. Nonetheless, the media, the public and a slew of charlatans jumped on the autointoxication bandwagon in the early twentieth century.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

In his reply, Einstein cited his ability to spot anomalies that others miss: “When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved,” he explained, implicitly referring to his theory of relativity. “I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.”52 But luck, to paraphrase Louis Pasteur, favors the prepared. Only when we pay attention to the subtle clues—there’s something off with the data, the explanation seems cursory or superficial, the observation doesn’t quite fit the theory—can the old paradigm give way to the new. As we’ll see in the next section, just as the embrace of uncertainty leads to progress, progress itself generates uncertainty, as one discovery calls into question the other.

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When it comes to boosting creativity, cognitive diversity—blending together your version of scientists and engineers—isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a necessity. But there’s another level of cognitive diversity that often gets overlooked. Beginner’s Mind In the 1860s, the silk industry in France was endangered by a disease that threatened silkworms. Chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas urged his former student, Louis Pasteur, to work on the problem. Pasteur was hesitant. “But I never worked with silkworms,” he protested. Dumas replied, “So much the better.”82 Most of us don’t do what Dumas did. We instinctively dismiss the opinions of amateurs like Pasteur. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t attended the relevant meetings.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

Planet Earth was ready to move on to its next ambitious phase. But before we get too excited about that, it is worth remembering that the world, as we are about to see, still belongs to the very small. 20 SMALL WORLD IT'S PROBABLY NOT a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumably did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner. In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive.

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Brown, who lived from 1773 to 1858, called it nucleus from the Latin nucula, meaning little nut or kernel. Not until 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular. It was Theodor Schwann, a German, who had this insight, and it was not only comparatively late, as scientific insights go, but not widely embraced at first. It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from preexisting cells. The belief became known as the “cell theory,” and it is the basis of all modern biology. The cell has been compared to many things, from “a complex chemical refinery” (by the physicist James Trefil) to “a vast, teeming metropolis” (the biochemist Guy Brown).

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Margulis and Sagan, p. 17. 32 “you could pack a billion . . .” Brown, The Energy of Life, p. 101. 33 “Such fossils have been found just once . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 10. 34 “little more than ‘bags of chemicals'. . .” Drury, p. 68. 35 “to fill eighty books of five hundred pages.” Sagan, p. 227. CHAPTER 20 SMALL WORLD 1 “Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist . . .” Biddle, p. 16. 2 “a herd of about one trillion bacteria . . .” Ashcroft, p. 248; and Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p. 4. 3 “Your digestive system alone . . .” Biddle, p. 57. 4 “no detectable function at all.” National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 51. 5 “about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells.”

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century public health benefited by characterizing the tobacco industry and polluters as sources of cancer threat to the community, fast-food distributors as heart disease promoters, and radiation emitters as creators of deformed babies. But the links were never as strong, either scientifically or politically, as those Biggs, France’s Louis Pasteur, and their contemporaries made between germs and infectious diseases. Public health in the wealthy world, therefore, struggled to maintain respect, funding, and self-definition in the late twentieth century. It was no coincidence that one hundred years previously the precious concept of public health arose in New York City, as it was the world’s center of nineteenth-and twentieth-century globalization.

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While civic leaders targeted hogs, dirt, and horse manure, more sophisticated notions of disease were percolating overseas: talk of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was on everyone’s lips. Rudolf Virchow in 1858 published Die Cellularpathologie, which drew from his extensive laboratory studies to demonstrate that human illness functioned at the cellular level. The following year in Paris, Dr. Claude Bernard published the first modern book of human physiology. And in 1862 Louis Pasteur had published in France his theory of the existence of “germs,” which, he argued, were key to fermentation. But America was focused on the Civil War. By far the majority of the 535,000 deceased soldiers were victims of disease or the hideous health care practices that resulted in the amputation of most injured limbs and proved fatal to 62 percent of those with chest wounds and 87 percent with abdominal wounds.41 While public health improved in most other northeastern cities, save among soldiers, New York’s stagnated.

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Further, the sanitarians, among whom Christian moralists predominated, were slow to note advances in science. But advances there were indeed. Antiseptics were discovered in 1870 by England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who found that by pouring carbolic acid on a wound or a suture site, infection would never take hold there. Beginning in 1876 Drs. Robert Koch in Berlin and Louis Pasteur in Paris were racing to identify the individual germs that caused disease.50 In 1880 Pasteur published his landmark Germ Theory of Disease, in which he argued that all contagious diseases were caused by microscopic organisms that damaged the human victim at the cellular level—as Rudolf Virchow had argued—and spread from person to person.

Day We Found the Universe
by Marcia Bartusiak
Published 6 Apr 2009

Curtis had removed himself from big telescope access; Shapley refused to consider that spirals could be huge stellar systems. Only Hubble pursued the question with dogged effort and even he had been looking for novae at first, not Cepheids in particular. Luck certainly played a small role, but as Louis Pasteur once put it, “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Once the news was out, reporters couldn't get enough of the tall and broad-shouldered Major Hubble, as they often addressed him. He was turning into an accomplished popular communicator. “There is just not one universe,” Hubble told a local journalist about his discovery.

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Sandage (2004), pp. 495–98. 217 “spiral nebulae” were on his agenda and that “cosmogony” would be his future field: HUA, Shapley to Kellogg, June 10, 1920, and December 1, 1920. 217 “The work that Hubble did on galaxies was very largely using my methods”: Shapley (1969), pp. 57–58. 217 “in the fields of observation”: Louis Pasteur, Inaugural Lecture, University of Lillé, December 7, 1854. 218 “There is just not one universe”: HUB, Box 28, Scrapbook. 218 catchiest headline: Ibid. 218 “more systems of stars than there are hairs in the whiskers of Santa Claus”: Blades (1930), p. J10. 218 “Professor Edwin Hubble announces that he has found another universe”: “The Universe, Inc.” (1926), 133. 218 “Astronomy, as a matter of popular interest”: “Crowd Jams Library for Hubble Talk” (1927). 218 “It is like looking at those lights”: Blakeslee (1930). 218 did by chance discover “Comet Hubble” in August 1937: HUB, 100-inch Logbook. 218 “I am commuting to a spiral nebula”: HUB, Box 8, biographical memoir. 219 “astronomy is a science in which exact truth is ever stranger than fiction”: Jeans (1929), p. 8. 219 “How terrifying!

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili
Published 14 Oct 2014

But vitalism was undermined by the work of several nineteenth-century scientists who succeeded in isolating chemicals from living cells that were identical to those synthesized in the laboratory. For example, in 1828 the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler managed to synthesize urea, a biochemical that had previously been thought to be peculiar to living cells. Louis Pasteur even succeeded in reproducing chemical transformations, such as fermentation, previously thought to be unique to life, by using extracts from living cells (later called enzymes). Increasingly, the matter of the living appeared to be made up from pretty much the same chemicals that made up the nonliving, and thereby likely to be governed by the same chemistry.

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When he recovered the capsules he discovered that the meat was completely digested, despite the fact that, protected within the metal, it could not have been subject to any mechanical action. Descartes’s cogs, levers and grinders were clearly insufficient to account for at least one of life’s vital forces. A century after de Réaumur’s work, another Frenchman, the chemist and founder of microbiology Louis Pasteur, studied another biological transformation hitherto attributed to “vital forces”: the conversion of grape juice into wine. He showed that the transforming principle of fermentation appeared to be intrinsically associated with living yeast cells that were present in the “ferments” used in the brewing industry, or in the leaven used to make bread.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
by Richard Dawkins
Published 28 Feb 1995

Perhaps here is an opportunity for "like begets like"-for chemical heredity. Could right-handed molecules spawn right-handed daughter molecules and left-handers spawn southpaw daughter molecules? First, some background information on mirror-image molecules. The phenomenon was first discovered by the great nineteenth-century French scientist Louis Pasteur, who was looking at crystals of tartrate, which is a salt of tartaric acid, an important substance in wine. A crystal is a solid edifice, big enough to be seen with the naked eye and, in some cases, worn around the neck. It is formed when atoms or molecules, all of the same type, pile on top of one another to form a solid.

Why Orwell Matters
by Christopher Hitchens
Published 1 Jan 2002

This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the ‘main enemy’, fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression. Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it. He was speaking of the kind of openness of mind that allows elementary scientific innovation to occur, but the metaphor is a serviceable one. Orwell was, to an extent, conditioned to keep his eyes open in Spain, and to register the evidence.

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
by Nick Lane
Published 14 Oct 2005

By the nineteenth century, the students of fermentation split into two camps—those who thought that fermentation was a living process with a function (mostly the vitalists, who believed in a special vital force, irreducible to ‘mere’ chemistry), and those who considered fermentation to be purely a chemical process (mostly the chemists themselves). The century-long feud appeared to be settled by Louis Pasteur, a vitalist, who demonstrated that yeast was composed of living cells, and that fermentation was carried out by these cells in the absence of oxygen. Indeed Pasteur famously described fermentation as ‘life without oxygen’. As a vitalist, Pasteur was convinced that fermentation must have a purpose, which is to say, a function that was beneficial in some way for yeast, but even he admitted to being ‘completely in the dark’ about what this purpose might have been.

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It doesn’t sound very likely to me, especially given the tendency of ultraviolet radiation to break down complex organic molecules in the days before the ozone layer. Second, the perception of fermentation as simple and primitive is wrong. It reflects our prejudice that microbes are biochemically simple, which is untrue, and dates back to the ideas of Louis Pasteur, who described fermentation as ‘life without oxygen’, implying simplicity. But Pasteur, as we have seen, admitted to being ‘completely in the dark’ about the function of fermentation, so he could hardly conclude that it was simple. Fermentation requires at least a dozen enzymes, and, as the first and so only means of providing energy, can be seen as irreducibly complex.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
by William Thorndike
Published 14 Sep 2012

Managers and entrepreneurs who follow these principles, who commit to rationality and to thinking for themselves, can expect to make the most of the cards they’re dealt and to delight their shareholders. Postlude: Old Dogs, Old Tricks If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . . —Rudyard Kipling, “If” As the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Louis Pasteur once observed, “Chance favors . . . the prepared mind,” and speaking of prepared minds, let’s conclude by looking at how the two remaining active outsider CEOs, Warren Buffett and John Malone, navigated the financial meltdown that followed the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. As you would expect, both pursued dramatically different courses from their peers’.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

And that day lasted for more than 2,000 years. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, this began to change. Three events stand out as catalysts. In Budapest, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis identified microbes on doctors’ dirty hands as the cause of a deadly form of childbirth fever. In Paris, a scientist named Louis Pasteur proved that germs existed, establishing a new idea called germ theory and discovering the actual microbes that Semmelweis theorized were the cause of illness. And in Glasgow, a doctor named Joseph Lister created the antiseptic method by applying the principles of germ theory to surgical care. Before Lister’s innovation, more than 80 percent of patients died from postsurgical infections.

A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are
by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe
Published 8 Apr 2021

After all, they had brought already domesticated horses to Europe and could easily have continued to breed them. Instead, it seems they were compelled to tame wild horses and to cut themselves off from the horses that had carried them west. Historical experiments with animals may offer a clue as to why this was. In 1894, the famous bacteriologist Louis Pasteur sent Alexandre Yersin to Hong Kong, where the world’s third and—so far—final great plague pandemic was raging. The plague was a notorious scourge, but its causes were unknown. Having illegally obtained a couple of plague victims from the morgue, Yersin discovered the bacterium that would later be named after him, Yersinia pestis.

The Discovery of France
by Graham Robb
Published 1 Jan 2007

In most people’s minds, the man in black was supposed to be useful, like a doctor, a snake-catcher or a witch. He should be willing to write inaccurate letters of recommendation, to read the newspaper and to explain government decrees. He should also be able to pull strings in the spirit world, influence the weather and cure people and animals of rabies. (This partly explains the godlike status of Louis Pasteur, who developed a vaccine for rabies in 1885.) Naturally, this put the priest in a tricky position. If he refused to ring the bells to prevent a hailstorm, he was useless. If he rang the bells and it hailed anyway, he was inept. In 1874, the curé of the Limousin village of Burgnac refused to join a ‘pagan’ harvest procession.

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Apart from the overgrown, collapsing terraces that were cut into the hillsides and the almost windowless tenements where the heated silkworms munched the leaves and made the sound of heavy rain, there is nothing in the verdant scenery on either side of the Rhône to show that life in the land of industrial vegetation was just as hard and unpredictable as it was in the foundries and coalfields. In 1852, a disease called pébrine began to spread among the silkworms. By the time Louis Pasteur discovered the cause and a cure in 1869, the industry had collapsed, the Suez Canal had opened and cheaper silk was being imported from the East. A worm had brought prosperity and a micro-organism took it away. At about the same time, the vines that smallholders had rushed to plant on their plots of rye and wheat were attacked by a peppery mildew called oidium.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

“You’re never completely at home, and that can drive you. It can challenge you not to seek being comfortable.” As with so many other observant and creative people, she found that a sense of detachment or slight alienation made her better at figuring out the forces at play. That helped her honor the maxim often preached by Louis Pasteur himself: Be prepared for the unexpected. Partly as a result, Charpentier became one of those scientists who could be both focused and distracted. Though impeccably groomed and casually elegant even when riding a bicycle, she also fit the stereotype of an absent-minded professor. When I traveled to see her in Berlin, where she moved after Umeå, she got to my hotel on her bike a few minutes late.

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Supreme Court began the process of defining what was “obvious” and “non-obvious” in assessing whether an invention was “not before known.” Deciding on patents was particularly difficult when it involved biological processes. Nevertheless, biological patents have a long history. In 1873, for example, the French biologist Louis Pasteur was awarded the first known patent for a microorganism: a method for making “yeast free from organic germs of disease.” Thus we have pasteurized milk, juice, and wine. The modern biotechnology industry was born a century later, when a Stanford attorney approached Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer and convinced them to file for a patent on the method they had discovered for manufacturing new genes using recombinant DNA.

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques
by Andrew Pole
Published 14 Sep 2007

Now, U0 = logX0 = 0, so that: µZ = √ √ 1 − (−1) = 2 e[1 − (−1)] e 1 − (0) From standard statistical tables (see references in Johnson, Kotz, and Balakrishnan), (−1) = 0.15865 so the mean of the median truncated lognormal distribution (with µY = 0, σ = 1) is 2.774. CHAPTER 8 Nobel Difficulties Chance favors the prepared mind. —Louis Pasteur 8.1 INTRODUCTION this chapter, we examine scenarios that create negative results for I nstatistical arbitrage plays. When operating an investment strategy, and notwithstanding risk filters and stop loss rules, surprises should be expected to occur with some frequency. The first demonstration examines a single pair that exhibits textbook reversionary behavior until a fundamental development, a takeover announcement, creates a breakpoint.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
by Marvin Harris
Published 1 Dec 1974

Unlike trichinosis, which seldom has fatal consequences and which does not even produce symptoms in the majority of infected individuals, anthrax often runs a rapid course that begins with body boils and terminates in death through blood poisoning. The great epidemics of anthrax that formerly swept across Europe and Asia were not brought under control until the development of the anthrax vaccine by Louis Pasteur in 1881. Jahweh’s failure to interdict contact with the domesticated vectors of anthrax is especially damaging to Maimonides’ explanation, since the relationship between this disease in animals and man was known during biblical times. As described in the Book of Exodus, one of the plagues sent against the Egyptians clearly relates the symptomology of animal anthrax to a human disease: … and it became a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and beast.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

These new lenses enabled the microbiological work of scientists such as Robert Koch, one of the first scientists to identify the cholera bacterium. (After receiving the Nobel Prize for his work in 1905, Koch wrote to Carl Zeiss, “A large part of my success I owe to your excellent microscopes.”) With his great rival Louis Pasteur, Koch and his microscopes helped develop and evangelize the germ theory of disease. From a technological standpoint, the great nineteenth-century breakthrough in public health—the knowledge that invisible germs can kill—was a kind of team effort between maps and microscopes. Today, Koch is rightly celebrated for the numerous microorganisms that he identified through those Zeiss lenses.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

He became depressed and was committed to an asylum, where he died at a relatively young age. The reason his approach did not catch on was simply because it conflicted with the prevailing paradigm that diseases were spread through ‘bad air’ or miasmas. It would take another half-century before the work of the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur gave rise to another paradigm, in which viruses and bacteria emerged as pathogens. The current dominant paradigm in psychiatry is the illness model. This also ties in seamlessly with the reduction of science to scientism: all results must be generalisable, based on objective and value-free research using accepted methods, independent of context.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

He connected this with the fact that the physicians had often come straight from autopsies, and made them wash their hands with chlorinated lime water, which reduced maternal deaths by almost ninety per cent. New microscopes had made it possible to see microorganisms. Especially important was the achromatic microscope, invented by Joseph Jackson Lister. The French chemist Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms could spoil milk and wine, and invented a technique to prevent bacterial contamination – pasteurization. He also developed vaccines for rabies and anthrax. As knowledge about microorganisms began to take hold, it gave an extra urgency to attempts to improve sanitation and water supplies and vaccination became routine.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System
by Ray Jayawardhana
Published 3 Feb 2011

Dealing with only one version, scientists suspect, is an advantage, if not a necessity, when building complex compounds like DNA and proteins. The same should hold true for life elsewhere. The question is how to espy this subtle characteristic from a distance. It’s fairly easy to detect chirality of purifed samples in the lab, as the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur did in 1848 for a compound derived from wine lees by measuring how the electric feld of light passing through the material is rotated clockwise or counterclockwise—a phenomenon known as circular polarization. Recently a team led by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute managed to do the same with photosynthetic microbes.

Jaws
by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich
Published 15 Jan 2018

Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who showed in the 1840s that the dangerous fever, which killed about 10 percent (in some cases, up to 30 percent) of women in maternity wards, could be nearly eliminated by careful hand washing by physicians. Doctors largely refused to believe his empirical evidence because it conflicted with then-current theories of contagion, which did not yet include Louis Pasteur’s germ theory. They recognized that diseases could be transferred from person to person, as Edward Jenner had shown by spreading cowpox from individual to individual to “vaccinate” them against smallpox. But they had no idea what the causative agent was, and many still believed that small animals like flies could be spontaneously generated from nonliving things like garbage.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Although this book is about the United States, many of the inventions were made by foreigners in their own lands or by foreigners who had recently transplanted to America. Among the many foreigners who deserve credit for key elements of the Great Inventions are transplanted Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Frenchmen Louis Pasteur for the germ theory of disease and Louis Lumière for the motion picture, Englishmen Joseph Lister for antiseptic surgery and David Hughes for early wireless experiments, and Germans Karl Benz for the internal combustion engine and Heinrich Hertz for key inventions that made possible the 1896 wireless patents of the recent Italian immigrant Guglielmo Marconi.

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This chapter pulls together the many explanations. These include the development of urban sanitation infrastructure, including running water and separate sewer pipes, that were part of the “networking” of the American home that took place between 1870 and 1929 (as discussed in chapter 4). A contribution was made by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which fostered public awareness about the dangers inherent in swarming insects and pools of stagnant water. The internal combustion engine deserves its share of credit for removing the urban horse and its prodigious and unrestrained outpouring of manure and urine onto city streets.

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The elements of surgery and the use of ether as an anesthetic were developed before the Civil War, and research on the use of anesthesia, including ether, chloroform, and even cocaine, continued after the Civil War. In the late nineteenth century, techniques were developed to use anesthesia in surgery, to remove gallstones, and to treat appendicitis, heart murmurs, and liver disease. Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch have been described as “the remarkable trio who transformed modern medicine.”89 Although individuals such as Pasteur and Koch often get credit for individual cures, progress was a team effort as scientists from the United States and several European countries replicated and improved on the early experiments.

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People
by Joe Navarro and Toni Sciarra Poynter
Published 6 Oct 2014

The list below is not all-inclusive, and there are many books out there that go into greater detail about dealing with toxic or dangerous personalities. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find some guidance here and that these tactics will help you as they have helped others in similar situations to stay safe. Gain Knowledge Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist who among other things gave us pasteurization, said with some authority, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” He was right. By now, you’ve read the previous chapters and are familiar with the four dangerous personalities and the accompanying checklists. (And many times I've heard people say, “Wow, I know someone exactly like that!”)

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

This stood in marked contrast to the notion of “spontaneous generation,” which dates back to the Romans and, as the name suggests, posits that life can arise spontaneously from non-living matter, such as maggots from rotting meat or fruit flies from bananas. In his famous 1859 experiments Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) disproved spontaneous generation by means of a simple experiment. He boiled broth in two different flasks, one with no cover and open to the air, one with an S-curved top containing a cotton plug. After the flask open to the air cooled, bacteria grew in it, but none grew in the second flask.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
by Dr. Jim Taylor
Published 9 Sep 2008

Considering oneself to be lucky, in other words, correlates with optimism, risk-taking, confidence, an action-orientation, and many of the other characteristics of the wealthy we have already described. Unlucky people, in contrast, have been shown to be more tense and anxious, creating a broader sense of passivity and risk-aversion, lessening their opportunities to expose themselves to new situations that might give rise to positive interactions or outcomes. As it turns out, Louis Pasteur was right when he said, ‘‘Chance favors only the mind that is prepared,’’ as was F. L. Emerson when he said, ‘‘I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.’’ The wealthy are luckier, but for the most part, they have created their own luck and they work to increase the number of opportunities they have to benefit from good luck.

A Natural History of Beer
by Rob DeSalle
Published 14 Jun 2019

People had long been aware that some specific element promoted fermentation, and selection for the agent concerned was implemented by transferring the floating froth that formed atop one brew to the next. But the discovery that fermentation was accomplished by the tiny living organisms we know today as yeasts had to await the research of the French chemist Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century. Once Pasteur had made his great discovery, however, it was only a matter of time before it was realized that the brewers of what had become known as lager were making their beer with a distinctive kind of yeast (see Chapter 8). Unlike the traditional Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which was happiest fermenting at around 21˚C, the newly recognized yeast now known as Saccharomyces pastorianus (for Pasteur) flourished at much cooler temperatures of around 4.5˚C; and unlike the top-fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it descended to the bottom of the fermenting tank, taking other detritus with it and leaving the liquid above clean and bright—albeit in earlier days typically quite dark in color, because that was the result when malt was roasted in a smoky, wood-fired kiln.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

There’s a practical distinction between blue-sky research into novel scientific concepts (also called basic research) and efforts to take scientific discoveries and make them useful (what’s known as applied or translational research). Although they’re different things, it’s a mistake to think—as some purists do—that basic science shouldn’t be tainted by considering how it might lead to a useful commercial product. Some of the best inventions have emerged when scientists start their research with an end use in mind; Louis Pasteur’s work on microbiology, for example, led to vaccines and pasteurization. We need more government programs that integrate basic and applied research in the areas where we most need breakthroughs. The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative is a good example of how this can work.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

While the debate raged between gourmands and decadents as to the true purpose of wine, the single most important breakthrough in humanunderstanding of alcoholic drinks—a complete and accurate scientific explanation of why they are alcoholic—was achieved in France. The genius responsible for the advance was Louis Pasteur. Prior to his definitive studies, no one in history had been able to describe precisely how grape juice turned into wine. For all they knew, it might have been the invisible hand of Bacchus or some other form of divine intervention. Pasteur made his breakthrough by building on the work of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who had discovered that the process of fermentation consisted of the conversion of carbohydrates to carbon dioxide and ethanol, which he named alcohol, thereby introducing the Arabic name for the substance to the West.

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The federal regulator, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), did not allow alcohol manufacturers to make “therapeutic or curative claims” about their products. Past attempts by people in the wine trade to add positive statements to their labels had been rejected, notably in the case of Kermit Lynch, an importer, who had sought and been refused permission to quote Thomas Jefferson (“Wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health”), Louis Pasteur (“Wine is the healthiest, most hygienic beverage known to man”), and 1 Timothy (“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”) on his merchandise.73 Initial attempts to incorporate quotations from or references to 60 Minutes into publicity material were rebuffed by the BATF.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
by David Quammen
Published 30 Sep 2012

Almost a century later, the physician John Snow used statistical charts as well as maps to demonstrate which water sources (notably, the infamous Broad Street pump) were infecting the most people during London’s cholera outbreak of 1854. Snow, like Bernoulli, lacked the advantage of knowing what sort of substance or creature (in this case it was Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium) caused the disease he was trying to comprehend and control. His results were remarkable anyway. Then, in 1906, after Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and Joseph Lister and others had persuasively established the involvement of microbes in infectious disease, an English doctor named W. H. Hamer made some interesting points about “smouldering” epidemics in a series of lectures to the Royal College of Physicians in London. Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval of time.

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The virulence of a given virus within a given host tells you something about the evolutionary history between the two. Just what does it tell you? That’s the tricky part. Most of us have heard an old chestnut on the subject of virulence: The first rule of a successful parasite is Don’t kill your host. One medical historian has traced this idea back to Louis Pasteur, noting that the most “efficient” parasite, in Pasteur’s view, was one that “lives in harmony with its host,” and therefore latent infections should be considered “the ideal form of parasitism.” Hans Zinsser voiced the same notion in Rats, Lice and History, observing that a long period of association between one species of parasite and one species of host tends to lead, by evolutionary adaptation, to “a more perfect mutual tolerance between invader and invaded.”

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

But before his work could have much benefit he had to persuade people – principally his medical colleagues – to change their behaviour. His real battle was not his initial discovery but what followed from it. His views were ridiculed and he was driven eventually to insanity and suicide. Much of the medical profession did not take his work seriously until Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister had developed the germ theory of disease, which explained why hygiene was important. We live in a pessimistic period. As well as being worried by the likely consequences of global warming, it is easy to feel that many societies are, despite their material success, increasingly burdened by their social failings.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott
Published 21 Aug 2017

Once stationary, the domus, with its humans, livestock, grain, feces, and plant wastes, makes an attractive feedlot for many commensals, from rats and swallows down the chain of predation to fleas and lice, bacteria and protozoa. The pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing. In fact, it was not until the late nineteenth-century discoveries of the founders of microbiology, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, that it became clear what a heavy price in chronic and lethal infections Homo sapiens was paying for the absence of clean water, sanitation, and sewage removal. As devastating new illnesses left humans not knowing what hit them, folk theories and remedies proliferated. Only one nostrum—“dispersal”—implicitly identified crowding as the basic cause.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler
Published 11 May 2015

The only fear Irv admits to is spiders. Irv’s father went into the family business. The hardware stores were called Weissman and Sons, but they have since closed down because, well, the sons had other ideas. When Irv was ten years old, he read Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters about the trailblazing work of Louis Pasteur and Paul Ehrlich and other early bacteriologists. For an entire generation of scientists this book proved seminal. Irv was no different. Inspired by Microbe Hunters and still in high school, Weissman got a job at a local lab doing transplantation research. He published two papers, both on cancer and transplantation, before turning eighteen.

The Eureka Factor
by John Kounios
Published 14 Apr 2015

However, bathing isn’t the only way to disengage from the outer world. The acclaimed writer Jonathan Franzen used more extreme measures while working on his novel The Corrections. To coax his imagination, he would often type in the dark while wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold. Whatever works. INSIGHT AND OUTSIGHT * * * Louis Pasteur, the great pioneer of biomedical research, once said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” This statement is a bit ambiguous even in its original context. We interpret “prepared mind” to mean a specific brain state that inclines one to solve problems by insight. Clearly, the existence of such a brain state would be an important discovery, not only because it would yield evidence about the origins of insight, but also because it would suggest ways to spark aha moments.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Published 20 Apr 2015

First, the project must further the quest for fundamental scientific under­standing, and second, it must have a practical use. DARPA favors projects that meet both of these criteria, allowing them to avoid highly theoretical projects with few practical applications, and projects that may have practical applications but offer few scientific benefits. The model for DARPA’s rules is Louis Pasteur, who advanced basic science while tackling real-world problems, like preservation of food and the prevention of tuberculosis. Boundary rules are also used to diagnose a wide range of medical conditions, from HIV and celiac disease to dangerous infections in infants, among others. Boundary rules can help medical staff make rapid decisions when delay can result in death.

An Edible History of Humanity
by Tom Standage
Published 30 Jun 2009

“First, enclose the substances you wish to preserve in bottles or jars; second, close the openings of your vessels with the greatest care, for success depends principally on the seal; third, submit the substances, thus enclosed, to the action of boiling water in a bain-marie . . . fourth, remove the bottles from the bain-marie at the appropriate time.” He listed the times necessary to boil different foods, typically several hours. Appert was not familiar with the earlier work of Boyle, Papin, and others; he had devised his method solely by experiment and had no idea why it worked. It was not until the 1860s that Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, finally determined that decomposition was caused by microbes that could be killed by applying heat. That is why Papin’s technique, which involved heating, had worked; but most of the time he had not heated his food samples enough to kill off the microbes. Appert’s long process of trial and error had revealed that heat had to be applied for several hours in most cases, and that some foods needed to be heated for longer than others.

SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 19 Oct 2009

In retrospect, it’s safe to say that Ignatz Semmelweis was going mad. At the age of forty-seven, he was tricked into entering a sanitarium. He tried to escape, was forcibly restrained, and died within two weeks, his reputation shattered. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right. Semmelweis was posthumously vindicated by Louis Pasteur’s research in germ theory, after which it became standard practice for doctors to scrupulously clean their hands before treating patients. So do contemporary doctors follow Semmelweis’s orders? A raft of recent studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should.

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski
Published 23 Feb 2016

“People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role.” Ulam believed the same could be said of scientific research. Some scientists ran into seemingly good fortune so often that it was impossible not to suspect that there was an element of talent involved. Chemist Louis Pasteur put forward a similar philosophy in the nineteenth century. “Chance favours the prepared mind” was how he put it. Luck is rarely embedded so deeply in a situation that it can’t be altered. It might not be possible to completely remove luck, but history has shown that it can often be replaced by skill to some extent.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

Hence even if we think slow and hard, conclusively finding causal relationships is difficult. Because our minds are used to an information-poor world, we are tempted to reason with limited data, even though too often, too many factors are at play to simply reduce an effect to a particular cause. Take the case of the vaccine against rabies. On July 6, 1885, the French chemist Louis Pasteur was introduced to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur had invented vaccination and had worked on an experimental vaccine against rabies. Meister’s parents begged Pasteur to use the vaccine to treat their son. He did, and Joseph Meister survived. In the press, Pasteur was celebrated as having saved the young boy from a certain, painful death.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

He wrote that the discoveries of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas and to Asia were the most important events of human history, because they linked all parts of the world in a web of transport and commerce, with vast potential benefits. Smith also wrote, with dismay, that the new sea routes occasioned a massive repression of native societies by European conquerors and colonizers. Because Smith lived a century before Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Giovanni Grassi, Ronald Ross, Martinus Beijerinck, and others who elaborated the bacterial and viral transmission of disease, he did not realize the key role that Old World pathogens played in devastating the Native American societies. Columbus brought to the Americas not only conquerors but also a massive biological exchange.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

Behind these figures lay an improvement in the average person’s quality of life of such a magnitude that those of us today who have never lived without running water, electricity or an indoor toilet may scarcely comprehend. Health is self-evidently one of the most important factors in the quality of life, and there too the world experienced a massive leap forward. Long before the advent of modern medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century, the contribution of the French scientist Louis Pasteur to the recognition of the germ theory of disease and the subsequent installation of sewerage and water networks in major towns at the turn of the twentieth century led to a sharp decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. Moreover, the introduction and diffusion over the next few decades of vaccinations against diseases, including smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough, generated a further drop in death rates.

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's
by Joseph Jebelli
Published 30 Oct 2017

I still found it hard to digest the knowledge that while Victoria’s mind slowly deconstructs, it was quietly being reconstructed under the nose of Wray and other scientists, creating a portal to somewhere no brain scan can go. It’s hard to say when expectation will meet reality for iPS cells. There is a huge element of luck in biological research. Take Louis Pasteur, the French pioneer of vaccination. His discovery of the chicken cholera vaccine only occurred when he abandoned the experiment out of frustration and took a vacation, returning to discover that leaving the broth was precisely what was necessary to ‘attenuate’, or weaken, the bacteria enough for it to become a vaccine.

Protein Power: The High-Protein/Low-Carbohydrate Way to Lose Weight, Feel Fit, and Boost Your Health--In Just Weeks!
by Michael R. Eades and Mary Dan Eades
Published 1 Jun 1999

Science progresses because people continue to question why. Researchers propose hypotheses based on their understanding of the natural world and then test them—and most of the time these theories blow up in their faces. The lucky ones stumble onto the hypotheses that turn out to be valid. But of course there’s more than luck involved, because as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and in our case our minds were prepared by many years of clinical practice with patients suffering all the illnesses that are heir to disordered insulin metabolism as well as by our unique combination of medical interests. Mike is a collector of diet books and old medical texts and has a strong interest in paleopathology and biochemistry; Mary Dan is interested in anthropology and has published a book on eating disorders and the deranged metabolic status of eating-disordered patients.

Frommer's Portable California Wine Country
by Erika Lenkert
Published 8 May 2006

The wines of the Greeks and Romans were probably as good, or as bad, as those made by monks in the Middle Ages and only a bit improved by secular winemakers from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. WINEMAKING 101 21 The science called oenology, which has given the world the highest overall quality of wine ever, was developed after Louis Pasteur’s work with fermentation and bacteriology around 150 years ago. Only in the past few generations have winemakers acquired very technical training and earned PhDs in viticulture (the science of grape growing) in a concentrated effort to understand wine and vineyards. Even with this recent development of science applied to wine, the catchphrase today for many winemakers in Sonoma and Napa is, “I want the wine to make itself.”

The Fractalist
by Benoit Mandelbrot
Published 30 Oct 2012

(Illustration Credit 23.1) Helping Lady Luck Through Telephones Do you recall that my testing of cotton prices began with a mysterious diagram on a blackboard? Well, Lady Luck struck again when I was asked to help with some troublesome noise on data transmittal telephones, and I found a way I liked of thriving as a jack-of-all-trades. An odd thing is that chance has helped me on many occasions. Louis Pasteur is credited with the observation that chance favors the prepared mind. I think that my long string of lucky breaks can be credited to my always paying attention. I look at funny things and never hesitate to ask questions. Most people would not have noticed the dirty blackboard or looked at the article that Szolem pulled from his wastebasket for me to read.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson
Published 18 Oct 2006

page 33 “burst forth… with extraordinary malignity” London Times, September 12, 1849, p. 2. page 34 The epidemic of 1848–1849 Koch, p. 42. pages 34–35 “While the mechanism of life” London Times, September 13, 1849, p. 6. page 35 “countenance quite shrunk” Shephard, p. 158. page 36 With the exception of a few unusual compounds “Louis Pasteur, who proved the microbial origin of such devastating diseases as foot and mouth disease, plague, and wine rot, set the tone of the relationship from the start. The context of the encounter between intellect and bacteria defined medicine as a battleground: bacteria were seen as ‘germs’ to be destroyed.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

And over the next half century, what Jenner termed “vaccination” (from the Latin root, vaccinia, used to denote cowpox) replaced variolation as the common prophylactic against the speckled monster. For several decades, the story ended there.2 But then, by happenstance, in the spring of 1879 a French scientist named Louis Pasteur was experimenting with chicken cholera. Having prepared several cholera cultures for injection into a batch of fowl, he turned to a separate research project—a distraction that lasted the entire summer. The following fall, when he injected a series of chickens with the months-old cholera cultures, something odd happened: rather than die, as most fowl did when exposed to the disease, these chickens fell ill and then recovered.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Newton discovers the laws of motion and universal gravitation and invents calculus, laying the foundation for classical mechanics, which among other achievements got us from the Earth to the Moon. Thomas Newcomen discovers how to make the first practical steam engine and launches the machine age. Henry Ford discovers how to dramatically lower costs through mass production and puts millions of Americans behind the wheel of a car. Louis Pasteur discovers the principles of vaccination and saves untold millions of lives. Norman Borlaug discovers ways to make major improvements in agriculture, saving over a billion people from starvation. The source of human progress is human ability, which means intellectual ability. The greatest contributors to production are not those who supply physical labor but those who contribute ideas—new theories, inventions, tools, businesses, and methods—to the productive process.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

So when Magdalena took a seat at her first meeting of the general partners, the assistants silently cheered. Her win was their win. THERESIA Shortly after Theresia made partner at Accel, the firm hosted its quarterly off-site “team building” event. Accel co-founder Arthur Patterson had adopted the Louis Pasteur quote “Chance favors the prepared mind”; he liked to gather the team to talk trends coming down the pipeline. Partners from Accel’s other offices flew in for the off-site, held in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco. Patterson told one and all, “The more you engage socially together, the more it helps you work together in business.

The Big Oyster
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 20 Dec 2006

C h o l e ra i s a d i s e a s e caused by bacteria, Vibrio cholerae. Although bacteria, the oldest form of life on earth, was first discovered in the seventeenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth century that its role in diseases was understood. Only a few years after the oyster panic, the French chemist Louis Pasteur promoted his theory that diseases were caused by germs. But it was only a theory—referred to as “the germ theory”—until the German bacteriologist Robert Koch started proving the connection. In 1884, after documenting the infection process of numerous other diseases, he demonstrated how Vibrio cholerae caused cholera.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

This scourge plagued humanity for ten thousand years. In the twentieth century alone, it killed 400 million people, more people than have died in all wars in all of history. Just think about that. And we eliminated it! Edward Jenner made a vaccination for it in the 1790s. This is astonishing because this was before Louis Pasteur was even born, and he is the person who developed germ theory. So we learned to vaccinate against smallpox before we knew it was caused by germs, with technology little better than stone knives and bear skins. But think about what we can do with our technology today. We can deconstruct our pathological foes down to their essence, and in the future we will model them in computers and try ten thousand treatments in a moment’s time.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

It was stopped only when the physician John Snow plotted all London cholera cases on a map; they were tightly clustered around the public water pump on Broad Street, the water of which had become contaminated. Snow persuaded the authorities to close this pump, stopping the outbreak. Citywide plumbing that brought clean water and took away sewage, combined with Louis Pasteur’s convincing demonstrations that germs caused diseases such as cholera, ensured that this was London’s last brush with King Cholera. Cholera outbreaks hint at an important fact: something like an Engels Pause occurred in aspects of health at the start of the Industrial Era. Improvements were not immediate.

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy
by F. Perry Wilson
Published 24 Jan 2023

THE HISTORY OF Medicine has been marked by some turning points so dramatic it is difficult to imagine how Medicine was practiced before they occurred. Before “germ theory” was developed, for example, there was no consistent, verifiable explanation for how infectious diseases occurred or why certain treatments (like dousing a fresh wound with alcohol) seemed to be effective. After Louis Pasteur fully fleshed out the relationship between microscopic organisms and disease in humans, the world was forever changed. Infectious disease—far and away the number one killer of human beings for the vast majority of human history—is now responsible for just a small fraction of global deaths. Tuberculosis, the number one infectious killer of humans in the world prior to COVID-19, led to 1.4 million worldwide deaths in 2019.

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex
by Rachel Feltman
Published 14 May 2022

But we have a secret weapon that koalas don’t: condoms. If you won’t suit up for yourself and your partner, do it for the li’l guys in Australia who wish they could. Long before humans knew that contact with microbes could cause disease (this, my friends, is called germ theory, and we have a man named Louis Pasteur and some dirty, kinky flasks to thank for it), we knew that having sex could make us sick. Or at least… we sort of did. Sometimes. The history of medicine is riddled with descriptions of strange leprosies that focused on the genitals, cruel skin afflictions most assuredly caused by poor hygiene, and oozy rashes sent down from heaven or up from hell, depending on the religious dogma of the time.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett
Published 31 Oct 1994

To see a virus, scientists needed powerful, expensive electron microscopes, but since the days of Dutch lens hobbyist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who in 1674 invented a microscope, it has been possible for people to see what he called “wee animalcules” with little more than a well-crafted glass lens and candlelight. The relationship between those “animalcules” and disease was first figured out by France’s Louis Pasteur in 1864, and during the following hundred years bacteriologists learned so much about the organisms that young scientists in 1964 considered classic bacteriology a dead field. In 1928 British scientist Alexander Fleming had discovered that Penicillium mold could kill Staphylococcus bacteria in petri dishes, and dubbed the lethal antibacterial chemical secreted by the mold “penicillin.”13 In 1944 penicillin was introduced to general clinical practice, causing a worldwide sensation that would be impossible to overstate.

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As a medical community, there is no cause to feel humiliated by the Legionnaires’ affair, but it is altogether proper that we be humbled.”65 Chagrined by events of 1976, the U.S. public health community looked to the future, for the first time in the late twentieth century, with a vague sense of unease. 7 N’zara LASSA, EBOLA, AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POLICIES Improvement in health is likely to come, in the future as in the past, from modification of the conditions which lead to disease, rather than from intervention into the mechanisms of disease after it has occurred. —Thomas McKeown, 1976 The microbe is nothing; the terrain everything. —Louis Pasteur While his colleagues in Atlanta anguished over Swine Flu damage control, Joe McCormick was content to finally have a chance to uncrate several thousand pounds of laboratory equipment and build his remote Lassa Fever Research Unit in Sierra Leone. It hadn’t been easy getting all the gear by ship from Atlanta to Freetown and by assorted trucks along the sporadically paved roads to Segbwema.

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Pakistan; antibiotic resistance in Palese, Peter Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Pan American Sanitary Conference Panama; malaria in; yellow fever in Pangu Kaza Asila Panos Institute Papua New Guinea; Institute of Medical Research; malaria in paramyxovirus simian virus parasites; drugs for; see also specific diseases parasitology Parke-Davis Parmenter, Robert Parodi, A. S. Pasteur, Louis Pasteur Institute Pattyn, Stefan Paul Ehrlich Institute Peace Corps pediculosis Peloponnesian War pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) penicillin; resistance to Penicillinase–Producing Neisseria gonorrhoeae (PPNG) Pennsylvania Department of Health pentamidine Peromyscus; P. leucopus; P. manicu-Latus Persian Gulf war pertussis Peru: AIDS in; cholera in; cocaine production in; deforestation in Peter, Georges Peters, C.

Extraterrestrial Civilizations
by Isaac Asimov
Published 2 Jan 1979

Advocates of the doctrine of spontaneous generation pointed out that heat might kill some “vital principle” essential to the production of life out of inanimate matter. Heating broth and sealing it away would in that case fail to produce life. Exposing heated broth to air that had likewise been heated was no better. In 1864, however, the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) produced the clincher. He boiled a meat broth until it was sterile, and did so in a flask with a long, thin neck that bent down, then up again, like a horizontal 5. Then he neither sealed it off nor stoppered it. He left the broth exposed to cool air. The cool air could penetrate freely into the vessel and bathe the broth.

Rats
by Robert Sullivan
Published 8 May 2009

Fear kept them from utilizing that knowledge—fear on the part of the city's business interests, fear that in turn inspired fear in the poorest parts of the city, which were most susceptible to disease and its ramifications. The plague that arrived in San Francisco was part of the third plague pandemic that had broken out in China in 1850. Alexandre Yersin, a French microbiologist, identified the plague bacillus that was eventually named for him, Yersinia pestis, in 1894. Yersin worked with Louis Pasteur at Pasteur's institute in Paris. Yersin had met Pasteur after Yersin had cut his finger while operating on a man who had been bitten by a wild dog; his finger still bleeding, Yersin ran immediately to Pasteur's laboratory, where he was vaccinated with Pasteur's new rabies vaccine. When a plague epidemic erupted in Hong Kong, Pasteur sent Yersin to investigate.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

This protected them from the elements and flooded their houses with light, initiating a great leap forward in hygiene. Dirt and vermin became visible, and living spaces clean and disease free. As a result, plague was eliminated from most of Europe by the early eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, transparent, easily sterilised swan-necked glass flasks allowed the French chemist Louis Pasteur to disprove the theory that germs spontaneously generated from putrefying matter. This led to a revolution in the understanding of disease and to the development of modern medicine. Not long afterwards, glass light bulbs changed both work and leisure forever. Meanwhile, new trade links between East and West in the nineteeth century meant that a technologically backward China soon caught up.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

In the 1840s, when Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that having medical students wash their hands dramatically reduced death rates during childbirth, he was scorned by his colleagues and ended up in an asylum. It would be two decades before his ideas gained scientific legitimacy as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch laid the foundations of germ theory. As physicist Max Planck once observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” I don’t mean to imply that it’s never wise to be first.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
by Laurence Gonzales
Published 1 Dec 1998

Eventually, she came to a hut along the banks of the river she’d been following. She staggered and collapsed inside. There is always a lot of chance involved in a survival situation, both good luck and bad. It was Juliane’s good fortune that three hunters turned up the next day and delivered her to a local doctor. But, as Louis Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” Tough and clearheaded, this teenage girl, who had lost her shoes (not to mention her mother) on the first day, saved herself; the other survivors took the same eleven days to sit down and die. The forces that put them there were beyond their control. But the course of events for those who found themselves alive on the ground were the result of deep and personal individual reactions to a new environment.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

A third quadrant, to which Stokes gives no name, is for research that does not seek to advance either basic or applied science; examples would be nineteenth-century classification projects in natural history. The fourth quadrant, named for 120 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia the great French chemist and life scientist Louis Pasteur, is for Stokes the most important. For this quadrant encompasses research that, like Pasteur’s, is both basic and applied. It advances fundamental understandings while solving significant practical problems. Pasteur’s research “was motivated by the very practical objectives of improving industrial processes and public health.

The Hot Zone
by Richard Preston
Published 1 Jan 1994

He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to use it at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola ever came to the surface again. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies. 1989 SUMMER The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the Veterinary Corps. What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits?

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

As Brian Eno says, the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping onto unfamiliar ground. Eiduson’s research project isn’t the only one to reach this conclusion. Her colleagues looked at historical examples of long-term scientific achievers, such as Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, and compared them to “one-hit wonders” such as James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, and Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. They found the same pattern: Fleming and Pasteur switched research topics frequently; Watson and Salk did not. This sort of project switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
Published 29 Aug 2021

The difference between the living and the non-living, between the animate and the inanimate, appeared so fundamental that it was considered implausible that it could ever be bridged by mechanistic explanations of any sort. This philosophy of vitalism reached a peak in the nineteenth century. It was supported by leading biologists like Johannes Müller and Louis Pasteur, and it persisted well into the twentieth century. Vitalists thought that the property of being alive could only be explained by appealing to some special sauce: a spark of life, an elán vital. But as we now know, no special sauce is needed. Vitalism today is thoroughly rejected in scientific circles.

Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik
Published 7 Jan 2022

Congress responded with a bill to fund infectious disease research under the direction of the newly formed National Board of Health. This investment—most of it funding a small navy research complex on Staten Island—made the United States a laggard by European standards. Beginning in the early 1870s, Germany and France had underwritten the early development of bacteriology in the laboratories of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. Once again it was war that pushed the government into new territory. During the 1898 conflict with Spain, U.S. troops faced a devil’s division of cholera and malaria ten times deadlier than the antiquated arms of Spanish soldiers. A jolted Congress acted fast to expand the budget and purview of the Marine Hospital Service to investigate infectious diseases and other “matters pertaining to public health.”

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Published 23 Jan 2024

For example, the now expired patent for the webpage ranking device that lies at the origin of Google’s vast fortune “was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant number IRI-9411306-4”;56 the division of rights between the manufacturers of a Covid vaccine and the National Institute of Health is yet to be settled.57 Nowadays, two contrasting models of how inventions come about overhang discussions of the utility and effectiveness of patents in “new manufactures”. One model is provided by the serendipitous discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928; the other, by Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb in 1878. Among instances of the first model: Louis Pasteur’s chance observation that cultures of chicken cholera became harmless over time, leading to the development of vaccines for all manner of diseases; and Pierre Berthier’s observation in 1821 that alloys of iron and chrome were resistant to rust, leading to the development of stainless steel. The light-bulb model, which is perhaps dominant in many minds nowadays, is less clear-cut than it might seem.

Lonely Planet France
by Lonely Planet Publications
Published 31 Mar 2013

Although his urban dream was never fully realised, Ledoux’s semicircular saltworks is now listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Regular trains link Besançon and Arc-et-Senans (€7, 30 minutes, 10 daily). ROUTE PASTEUR Almost every single town in France has at least one street, square or garden named after Louis Pasteur, the great 19th-century chemist who invented pasteurisation and developed the first rabies vaccine. In the Jura it is even more the case, since the illustrious man was a local lad. Pasteur was born in 1822 in the well-preserved medieval town of Dole , former capital of Franche-Comté, 20km west of Arc-et-Senans along the D472.

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A scenic stroll along the Canal des Tanneurs in the historic tanner’s quarter brings you to his childhood home, La Maison Natale de Pasteur (www.musee-pasteur.com; 43 rue Pasteur, Dole; adult/child €5/free; 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun) , now an atmospheric museum housing exhibits that include his cot, first drawings and university cap and gown. In 1827 the Pasteur family settled in the bucolic village of Arbois (population 3653), 35km southeast of Dole. His laboratory and workshops here are on display at La Maison de Louis Pasteur (83 rue de Courcelles, Arbois; adult/child €6/3; guided tours 9.45-11.45am & 2-6pm, closed mid Oct–Mar) . The house is still decorated with its original 19th-century fixtures and fittings. ARBOIS & THE ROUTE DES VINS DE JURA Corkscrewing through some 80km of well-tended vines, pretty countryside and stone villages is the Route des Vins de Jura (Jura Wine Road; www.laroutedesvinsdujura.com) .

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Construction began in the 13th century, and was completed in 1451; the mismatched materials resemble Lego blocks. Above the north aisle are three lovely stained-glass windows; the oldest, in the Chapelle Saint Jérôme, dates from 1531. The entrance to the stately 13th-century cloister Offline map Google map is on place Louis Pasteur. Ramparts CITY WALL Offline map Google map Bayonne’s 17th-century fortifications are now covered with grass, dotted with trees and enveloped in pretty parks. You can walk the stretches of the old ramparts that rise above bd Rempart Lachepaillet and rue Tour de Sault. Tours The tourist office organises a range of city tours ( adult €6-10; some in English), from a historical tour of old Bayonne to a chocolate-fiend or museum tour.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh
Published 17 Aug 2008

Each black oblong represents one death, and the Broad Street pump can be seen at the centre of the epidemic. Other major scientific breakthroughs included vaccination, which had been growing in popularity since the start of the 1800s, and Joseph Lister’s pioneering use of antiseptics in 1865. Thereafter Louis Pasteur invented vaccines for rabies and anthrax, thus contributing to the development of the germ theory of disease. Even more importantly, Robert Koch and his pupils identified the bacteria responsible for cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, leprosy, bubonic plague, tetanus and syphilis.

Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2008

He was pretty sure that this was because the medical students were carrying something nasty from the corpses in the dissection room, so he instituted proper handwashing practices with chlorinated lime, and did some figures on the benefits. The death rates fell, but in an era of medicine that championed ‘theory’ over real-world empirical evidence, he was basically ignored, until Louis Pasteur came along and confirmed the germ theory. Semmelweis died alone in an asylum. You’ve heard of Pasteur. Even when Edward Jenner introduced the much safer vaccination for protecting people against smallpox at the turn of the nineteenth century, he was strongly opposed by the London cognoscenti.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large
by Stephen Morris
Published 1 Sep 2007

Alexandra Hicks, food writer and avid gardener, explains garlic's magic:“Simply stated, when a clove of garlic is cut or crushed, its extracellular membrane separates into sections.This enables an enzyme called allinase to come in contact and combine with the precursor or substrate alliin to form allicin, which contains the odoriferous constituent of garlic.” Renowned for his revelation that microscopic germs caused infection, French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur was first to recognize garlic's antibacterial properties.To demonstrate garlic's amazing strength, imagine that one milliliter of raw garlic juice can be compared to a milligram of streptomycin or sixty micrograms of penicillin. 216 chapter 8 : The Good Life Interview Jason and the Laundronauts by Jason Wentworth QUESTION: What work do you do?

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love
by Dava Sobel
Published 25 May 2009

Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

So you see that criticizing NLP is like criticizing a hammer.” I tell him I’ve read terrible things about NLP on the Internet—how some scientists call it nonsense—and he says, “I know it’s not scientific. Some of the techniques will not always work in the same way in a laboratory every time!” He laughs. “But Louis Pasteur was accused of being in league with the Devil. The Wright brothers were called fraudsters. . . .” • • • MONDAY. I spot Richard Bandler by the stage, surrounded by fans. “Wow,” he says as a woman hands him a rare copy of his book Trance-formations. “That goes for, like, six hundred dollars on eBay.”

Cultureshock Paris
by Cultureshock Staff
Published 6 Oct 2010

He instituted social, legal and administrative reforms, but disastrous military campaigns forced him into exile. After a triumphant return of 100 days, he was defeated by Wellington at Waterloo, and died eventually on the remote island of Saint-Helena. Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) A writer popular worldwide, Dumas’ most famous novels are The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) Father of modern medicine whose discoveries are credited with lengthening the human lifespan. Developed a method to eliminate contaminated milk (pasteurisation) and immunisations to combat disease. Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) Elevated French cooking to an art, creating what is known as haute cuisine.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

But more than any other actor, Lessig’s individual role in translating the meanings of F/OSS deserves attention. He acted as a “spokesperson” for many years—a role conceptualized in the work of Latour (1987, 1988) as a prominent person who enrolls allies, builds institutions, changes perceptions, and translates the message of free software in ways that appeal to a wider constituency. Just as Louis Pasteur served as the spokesperson who made the germ theory of illness compelling and intelligible to wider publics (Latour 1993), Lessig has worked assiduously, passionately, and diligently to bring out and successfully translate the artifacts and messages of F/OSS from the confines of the hacker lab out to the field.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

We’ve known about bacteria for 350 years, ever since a seventeenth-century Dutch scientist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, slipped some of his saliva under a homemade microscope, which he had crafted with lenses made from whiskers of glass, and espied single-celled organisms crawling, sprawling, flailing about in the suburbs of our gums. He named them animalcules and peered at them through a vast array of lenses (an avid microscoper, he made over five hundred). In the nineteenth century Louis Pasteur proposed that healthy microbes might be vital, and their absence spur illness. By the time tiny viruses were discovered, only a hundred years ago, people were already driving cars and flying airplanes. But we didn’t have the tools to study the every-colored, shifting, scented shoal of microbes we swim in, play in, breathe in all the day long.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

There, his ideas could be tested, refined, and built upon to anchor what became the discipline we call physics and the community we identify as physicists. In his book The Scientific Attitude, another philosopher of science, Lee McIntyre, adduces a more recent example of how reality-based networks boot up.15 The nineteenth century was a time of momentous breakthroughs in the understanding of disease: Louis Pasteur and germ theory, Robert Koch and bacteriology, Joseph Lister and antiseptics. Yet throughout that century, and even into the early years of the twentieth, “For all its progress, medicine was not yet a science,” writes McIntyre. All kinds of cranks claimed to be doctors; practices and training were haphazard and unscientific; practitioners based their work on hunches and anecdotes; folk medicine and lay healing were standard treatments; the number of drugs which actually worked could be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
by Carl Zimmer
Published 9 Mar 2021

At one point in The Emergence of Life, he offered a definition of life, but it sounded more like a cry for help: “Life is what IS.” * * * — I never learned about Burke when I was growing up. I was taught the standard pantheon of biologists, which is mostly made up of scientists with ideas that turned out to be right: Darwin and his tree of life, Mendel and his genetic peas, Louis Pasteur and his disease-causing germs. It’s easier that way: to leapfrog from one designated hero to the next—to ignore the mirages along the way, the failures, the fame that curdled. When I started writing about biology, I still didn’t learn about Burke. I have had the good fortune to get to know many forms of life and many of the scientists who study them.

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting
by Giles Yeo
Published 3 Jun 2019

In ‘favourable’ conditions, these microzymas would be turned into cells; however, in unfavourable host and environmental conditions, the microzymas would turn into bacteria and other microorganisms, resulting in disease. Béchamp called the process by which microzymas changed from one form to another, ‘pleomorphism’; essentially a form of spontaneous generation. Béchamp’s bitter rival at the time was Louis Pasteur (1822–95). Pasteur is regarded as the father of ‘germ theory’, that infection came from the outside. While he didn’t originally propose it, he performed the experiments showing that without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Pasteur demonstrated that in sterilised and sealed flasks nothing would grow, whereas if he sterilised a flask and then left it open, bacteria and other microorganisms would rapidly grow, and in doing so proved that ‘germ theory’ was correct.

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The...
by Sally Fallon , Pat Connolly and Mary G. Enig, Phd.
Published 14 May 1995

Variation: Creamy Red Pepper Sauce Stir in ½ cup piima cream or creme fraiche. Variation: Thin Red Pepper Sauce Stir in ½ to 1 cup warm fish stock, chicken stock or beef stock until desired consistency is obtained. Once upon a time there was a scientific debate. The debate was between the ideas put forth by Louis Pasteur and the ideas outlined by Antoine Bechamp. The scientific community adopted the ideas of Pasteur and completely rejected the ideas of Bechamp. Because of that rejection, and the growth of dogma attached to the theories of Pasteur, our modern medical science may be digging a deep hole for all of us in our desires to overcome disease.

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Add tomato, raise heat and saute a few minutes until liquid is almost all absorbed. Add zucchini, garlic, thyme and pepper. Saute about 1 minute more until flavors are amalgamated. Don't let zucchini overcook! Germs, viruses and other microorganisms are usually present, but merely as scavengers that feed on toxic wastes. While we must thank Louis Pasteur for annihilating the belief that disease was caused by demons and evil, substituting in its place the germ theory, we must not forget that Bechamp, who was a contemporary of Pasteur, strongly maintained that the chemical background on which the germ fed was of equal importance. Man had to choose between the two causes of disease: either the toxic background, due to faulty living and eating habits, was responsible for disease; or a mysterious microorganism, hiding in dark corners, pounced upon the innocent and unsuspecting victim.

Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick
Published 18 Oct 2011

The heart of the experiment was even smaller, a cell about the size of a lemon seed, carved in stainless steel with the sharpest possible edges and walls. Into the cell was fed liquid helium chilled to about four degrees above absolute zero, warm compared to Libchaber’s old superfluid experiments. The laboratory occupied the second floor of the École physics building in Paris, just a few hundred feet from Louis Pasteur’s old laboratory. Like all good general-purpose physics laboratories, Libchaber’s existed in a state of constant mess, paint cans and hand tools strewn about on floors and tables, odd-sized pieces of metal and plastic everywhere. Amid the disarray, the apparatus that held Libchaber’s minuscule fluid cell was a striking bit of purposefulness.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Fighting for liberty includes anything that frees people from social, biological and physical constraints, be it demonstrating against brutal dictators, teaching girls to read, finding a cure for cancer, or building a spaceship. The liberal pantheon of heroes houses Rosa Parks and Pablo Picasso alongside Louis Pasteur and the Wright brothers. This sounds extremely exciting and profound in theory. Unfortunately, human freedom and human creativity are not what the liberal story imagines them to be. To the best of our scientific understanding, there is no magic behind our choices and creations. They are the product of billions of neurons exchanging biochemical signals, and even if you liberate humans from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union, their choices will still be dictated by biochemical algorithms as ruthless as the Inquisition and the KGB.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

In 1998, for example, a promising drug from Folkman’s lab was shown to eradicate tumors in mice. A page one New York Times story quoted the Nobel laureate James Watson saying, “Judah will cure cancer in two years” (Watson later challenged the quote). Media coverage exploded. Reporters compared Folkman to Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur; a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist who had been diagnosed with colon cancer wrote a column announcing, “Maybe we don’t have to die”; and patients besieged Folkman’s hospital for access to the drug, which was not yet in clinical trials. As with most new ideas in drug discovery, the first drug didn’t pan out.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Others were so hung up on the perceived deficiencies of Semmelweis’s theoretical explanation that they ignored the empirical evidence that the handwashing was improving mortality. After struggling to get his ideas adopted, Semmelweis went crazy, was admitted to an asylum, and died at the age of forty-seven. It took another twenty years after his death for his ideas about antiseptics to start to take hold, following Louis Pasteur’s unquestionable confirmation of germ theory. Like Wegener, Semmelweis didn’t fully understand the scientific mechanism that underpinned his theory and crafted an initial explanation that turned out to be somewhat incorrect. However, they both noticed obvious and important empirical truths that should have been investigated by other scientists but were reflexively rejected by these scientists because the suggested explanations were not in line with the conventional thinking of the time.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

The F protein swells, like an erection, burying the vulnerable epitope and effectively hiding it from the antibodies. McLellan’s challenge was to keep the F protein from getting an erection. Classically, vaccines are made from real viruses. One way is to weaken them to the point that they no longer cause illness but can still stir up an antibody response; that is how Louis Pasteur, one of the founding figures of microbiology, created a vaccine for cholera in chickens. Chemically inactivated viruses can fool the body into believing it is being infected; such vaccines have been used for encephalitis and rabies. But there was uncertainty. Immunologists were handicapped because they couldn’t clearly see what they were doing.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

Bacteria can reproduce outside a host, but while some viruses can live for a short while outside a host, they can’t reproduce outside one. In the late eighteenth century, English surgeon Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, the only infectious disease in human history ever to be eradicated, and around 1880, French biologist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against cholera bacteria. But neither researcher pinpointed the microscopic virus we now understand as the causal agent of so much biological activity. It wasn’t until Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky experimented on diseased tobacco plants in 1892 that scientists began to understand viruses as we now imagine them.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

In 1865, he was committed to a Viennese asylum where, after two weeks, he died from gangrene.10 His death was hardly noticed by the medical community. The director who took over from Semmelweis at his last clinic stopped the practice of handwashing. Maternal mortality rates immediately jumped sixfold. The virtual elimination of childbed fever happened not because of Semmelweis’s contributions, but instead thanks to Louis Pasteur’s. Why? Because Pasteur changed not just a procedure, but an entire science. In the 1860s, he conducted a set of experiments that demonstrated to physicians not only that Semmelweis had been right, but why he had been right. Pasteur showed conclusively that many diseases were caused not by foul-smelling atmospheric miasmas, but instead by very small organisms called germs.11 Semmelweis’s “cadaverous particles” were in fact microorganisms that were responsible for more than just contagious illnesses—Pasteur showed that they also caused bread to rise, cheese to ripen, beer and wine to ferment, and so on.12 He founded the science of microbiology, which has vastly improved our understanding of the world.

American Foundations: An Investigative History
by Mark Dowie
Published 3 Oct 2009

In 1891, when he created the University of Chicago, he set aside a special fund for scientific research; the university used it to lure to its faculty Albert Michelson, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics. Gates also persuaded Rockefeller to support medical research on a long-term basis. "Disease with its attendant evils is undoubtedly the main single source of human misery," Gates wrote his boss, who was already intrigued by the immunological advances of Louis Pasteur! In 1901 JDR created the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, modeling it directly on the Pasteur Institute. He pledged the institute $20,000 a year for ten years. Within six years it had identified the cause of several diseases and Rockefeller was granting it millions of dollars.

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee
by Bee Wilson
Published 15 Dec 2008

Both wine-makers and the French state recognized a desperate need to set new norms for wine making, to find new definitions of what “wine” actually was. Special new laws were passed dealing with adulteration. In 1889, raisin wines were specifically outlawed; in 1891, the practice of “chalking” was prohibited; in 1894, it was forbidden to sell either watered-down wines or wines laced with extra alcohol.41 In the meantime, Louis Pasteur had began to establish the science that would fi nally enable reliable avoidance of some of the most common failings in wine, without recourse to swindling. In the 1860s, Pasteur identified many of the microorganisms that caused different faults in the bottle. An excess bitterness was due to degraded glycerol; flabbiness was caused by a polysaccharide.

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism
by John U. Bacon
Published 7 Nov 2017

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., father of the Supreme Court Justice, first promoted the practice in two papers published in the mid-nineteenth century, the more established Charles D. Meigs fired back that washing hands was unnecessary because doctors were gentlemen, and “gentlemen’s hands are clean.” Fortunately, Dr. Holmes’s position found proponents overseas, where Scottish doctor Joseph Lister picked up on Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology to champion antiseptic surgery, using carbonic acid to clean surgeons’ hands and tools. When survival rates soared, he worked to overcome resistance from doctors like Charles D. Meigs to spread the practice. One of Lister’s protégés, Dr. Joseph Lawrence, was so impressed by his mentor that, after Lawrence perfected his cure for halitosis, he named it after the pioneering doctor: Listerine.

Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production
by Vaclav Smil
Published 18 Dec 2000

During the 1830s he maintained that the decomposition of organic matter into acids and alcohols is nothing but a purely inorganic chemical reaction.7 Thanks to more powerful microscopes, Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) and Charles Cagniard-Latour (1777–1859) were able to observe a clear correlation between growing Saccharomyces yeasts and alcoholic fermentation of grape juice, but Liebig retorted with a mechanistic explanation: atomic motions of the fermenting yeasts were breaking up molecules of grape sugar.8 The convincing explanation came in 1857 with Louis Pasteur’s (1822–1895) demonstration of the microbial nature of organic decomposition, but the process of biomass breakdown was satisfactorily explained only after Hans Buchner’s (1850–1902) accidental discovery of the first enzyme in 1897 opened a new era of biochemistry.9 Discovering Nitrogen Advances in the early understanding of intricate transfers of nitrogen among the atmosphere, soils, waters, and living organisms were no less complicated and controversial than was the elucidation of carbon pathways in photosynthesis, respiration, and decay.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

To explain how microorganisms slowly develop in water previously sterilized by boiling, Huygens proposed that they were small enough to float through the air and reproduced on alighting in water. Thus he established an alternative to spontaneous generation—the notion that life could rise, in fermenting grape juice or rotting meat, entirely independent of preexisting life. It was not until the time of Louis Pasteur, two centuries later, that Huygens’ speculation was proved correct. The Viking search for life on Mars can be traced in more ways than one back to Leeuwenhoek and Huygens. They are also the grandfathers of the germ theory of disease, and therefore of much of modern medicine. But they had no practical motives in mind.

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking
by Laurel Robertson , Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey
Published 2 Jan 1984

Yeast likes a neutral to slightly acid pH, and some oxygen too, though it can get on without it for a while. When plenty of oxygen is available, yeast metabolizes its food completely, multiplying energetically and giving off carbon dioxide and water as waste products. This efficient metabolic process is called respiration, and its discovery by Louis Pasteur was what made the commercial manufacture of yeast possible: bubbling air through the nutrient solution keeps the yeast metabolism efficient and its waste products harmless. When there is not much oxygen—as in bread dough, where the oxygen is rather quickly used up—yeast adapts by changing its metabolism from aerobic respiration to anaerobic fermentation.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

Befitting the great westward expansion, in the nineteenth century it was America’s pioneer spirit and can-do attitude that produced the world’s great inventors and implementers, including Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, but Europe was still the home of real science and the scientists who made the fundamental theoretical breakthroughs, including Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Max Planck, Alfred Nobel, and Lord Kelvin. This focus on tinkering and engineering versus science and discovery was partly because America lacked the well-established academies of Europe, but it also seemed to have something to do with the American character itself. French political scholar Alexis de Tocqueville noted this focus on pragmatism when he toured America in 1831 and 1832.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms
by Iain Overton
Published 15 Apr 2015

There were over 50,000 amputations in the American Civil War, and infections followed, the spectre of death hard on their tail.16 Tetanus had a mortality rate of 89 per cent and pyaemia, a type of septicaemia, killed 97 per cent of those who developed it.17 So devastating were these odds that, by the Spanish-American War of 1898, the medical profession recognised the urgent need for antisepsis. After reading findings by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister carried out experiments using carbolic acid and found it helped massively reduce the patient’s chances of dying if applied following amputations.18 Antiseptic dressings on the battlefield and saline solutions to hydrate patients were also brought into play – innovations conceived on the bloody, ragged fields of war.

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times
by Lucy Lethbridge
Published 18 Nov 2013

This refreshes their minds as well as their bodies, and drives out all impurities in consequence of the shut-in rooms and closed doors of the night.’22 The home became viewed as a laboratory for the new science of hygiene and health. The work of nineteenth-century scientists and supporters of germ theory, such as Joseph Lister, with his pioneering work on antiseptics, and Louis Pasteur, the microbiologist who developed vaccines, had led to a mania for sterilisation – increasingly interpreted by housework pundits not only as a key to public health but also to private virtue and inner purity. The Cassell’s Household Guide warned that dust was ‘impregnated with millions of more or less deadly microbes’.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

The historians Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz point out that in the nineteenth century sociology, which focused on the internal dynamics of societies rather than on their external environments, and anthropology, which began seeking out biological differences, provided new accounts of why people in different places lived in different ways. And the previously unimagined germs that Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch brought to humanity’s notice in the 1870s and 1880s led to accounts of disease that greatly reduced the role previously ascribed to the malign influences of bad climates. New explanations focusing on races and germs came to be built into the way societies were shaped, as well as the way they were talked about.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
Published 1 Mar 2018

Anytime the causal effect of X on Y is confounded by one set of variables (C) and mediated by another (M) (see Figure 7.2), and, furthermore, the mediating variables are shielded from the effects of C, then you can estimate X’s effect from observational data. Once scientists are made aware of this fact, they should seek shielded mediators whenever they face incurable confounders. As Louis Pasteur said, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Fortunately, the virtues of front-door adjustment have not remained completely unappreciated. In 2014, Adam Glynn and Konstantin Kashin, both political scientists at Harvard (Glynn subsequently moved to Emory University), wrote a prize-winning paper that should be required reading for all quantitative social scientists.

The Search for Life on Mars
by Elizabeth Howell
Published 14 Apr 2020

In this sense, the ultimate “informational” molecule is DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, which is made of proteins and amino acids that carry the genetic blueprint for and, in so many ways, define each and every species. If there is DNA in any form of life on Mars, one distinct difference may come from a discovery made by Louis Pasteur, the pioneer of vaccination and the heat treatment for liquids that bears his name. In the 1860s, Pasteur became curious when he saw dregs of wine left behind within their bottles. When he looked at their crystals under a microscope, Pasteur saw that they twisted the light in one direction. When the same crystals were synthesized in his laboratory, they twisted the other way.

A Dominant Character
by Samanth Subramanian
Published 27 Apr 2020

In 1958, the scientists Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl set up an experiment that was a tweak away from Haldane’s ingenious solution, labeling DNA strands with heavy nitrogen and tracking how they reprinted themselves. For its elegance and clarity, science historians call it “the most beautiful experiment in biology”—a glorious irony, given how Haldane, its progenitor, was among the clumsiest experimenters of his time. For Haldane, the model scientist was always Louis Pasteur, who in the nineteenth century developed vaccines, discovered how to halt the contamination of milk, and tripped up the headlong spread of disease. His influence, Haldane thought, was supreme—greater even than Darwin’s. Darwin changed the intellectual beliefs of his time, and his appeal was almost entirely to reason.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

She was determined to write a biography of the Girondist Madame Roland while selling freelance articles to Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers and attending classes at the Sorbonne. Hardworking and levelheaded, she mailed off two articles during her first week in Paris alone. Even though the prim Tarbell was taken aback when lascivious Frenchmen flirted with her, she adored her time in Paris. She interviewed eminent Parisians, ranging from Louis Pasteur to Emile Zola, for American newspapers and won many admirers for her clean, accurate reportage; she claimed that her writing had absorbed some of the beauty and clarity of the French language. Still, she struggled on the “ragged edge of bankruptcy” and was susceptible when McClure wooed her as an editor of his new magazine.

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Pelton, was inspired by the cathedrals of Chartres and Laon. Formally dedicated in 1931, the church was an ecumenical shrine that seemed to bridge both the spiritual and temporal worlds. Instead of saintly statues lining the chancel screen, one found scientists, doctors, educators, social reformers, and political leaders, including Louis Pasteur, Hippocrates, Florence Nightingale, and Abraham Lincoln. Statues of Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses stared down from archivolts above the main portal, while Darwin and Einstein occupied honored niches. After a few years, the congregation was both interdenominational and interracial, with fewer than a third of the members coming from Baptist backgrounds.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Surveying the slum quarters by the harbour where the impact of the disease was greatest, and remembering the squalid dwellings he had seen in Egypt and India, Koch turned to his team and said: ‘Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe.’ At the height of Europe’s age of imperialism, it was hard to think of a more damning verdict. In addition to Koch, the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822–95) had made significant discoveries based on the germ theory of disease, developing vaccines for anthrax and rabies, and inventing the technique of ‘pasteurization’ to heat milk and kill any germs it might be carrying. But direct medical intervention did little to prevent and still less to cure infectious diseases in the nineteenth century.

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The situation was very different in France, where all twenty-two universities had been abolished by the Revolution in 1789 as bastions of privilege, corruption and idleness, and replaced by specialized faculties and colleges that offered training to lawyers, doctors and teachers. Some of these became in due course serious centres of learning and research, such as the École Normale Supérieure, founded in 1795 and re-founded in 1826, where the medical scientist Louis Pasteur pushed through a series of major reforms. (These were not always popular: when he threatened to expel any students caught smoking, seventy-three out of the eighty students in the grande école promptly resigned.) There were in general very few students at these institutions – the Faculty of Letters at Caen had only twenty under the Restoration, for example, while the Faculty of Letters at Clermont-Ferrand had only seven in 1876.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

—RICHARD FEYNMAN, NOBEL LAUREATE Nanotechnology has given us the tools to play with the ultimate toy box of nature—atoms and molecules. Everything is made from these, and the possibilities to create new things appear limitless. —HORST STORMER, NOBEL LAUREATE The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. —LOUIS PASTEUR The mastery of tools is a crowning achievement that distinguishes humanity from the animals. According to Greek and Roman mythology, this process began when Prometheus, taking pity on the plight of humans, stole the precious gift of fire from Vulcan’s furnace. But this act of thievery enraged the gods.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

Researchers into tropical diseases set up laboratories in the most far-flung African colonies – the one established in Saint-Louis in 1896 was among the first. Animals kept there were injected with trial vaccines: eighty-two cats injected with dysentery, eleven dogs with tetanus. Other labs worked on cholera, malaria, rabies and smallpox. Such efforts had their roots in the pioneering work on germ theory by Louis Pasteur in the 1850s and 1860s. Empire inspired a generation of European medical innovators. It was in Alexandria in 1884 that the German bacteriologist Robert Koch – who had already isolated the anthrax and tuberculosis bacilli – discovered Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that transmits cholera, which only the previous year had killed Koch’s French rival Louis Thuillier.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

This gave him many opportunities to become familiar with Pittsburgh and its business establishment, and Carnegie made the most of them. Soon he was an operator, working the telegraph himself and able to interpret it by ear, writing down the messages directly. His salary was up to $25 a month. In 1853, in a classic example of Louis Pasteur’s dictum that chance favors the prepared mind, Thomas A. Scott, general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a frequent visitor to the telegraph office where Carnegie worked, needed a telegraph operator of his own to help with the system being installed by the railroad. He chose Carnegie, not yet eighteen years old.

The Medical Detectives
by Berton Roueche
Published 1 Jan 1980

The scientific comprehension of anthrax, though late in taking recognizable shape, was accomplished with dispatch. Few diseases have been so thoroughly riddled so fast. In addition to being the first disease irrefutably laid to a germ, it was the first of its kind to yield to total penetration and control. The control of anthrax was initiated by Louis Pasteur in 1881. In the spring of that year, before a gathering of scientists assembled near Paris by the Agricultural Society of Melun, he demonstrated (on a flock of sheep) that an animal inoculated with a culture of heat-attenuated B. anthracis was rendered immune to anthrax. He also showed, in another study, that the burial of infected animal carcasses (as originally recommended by Virgil) was not enough to check the natural spread of the disease.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 21 Sep 2009

Even if ‘the conditions for the first production of a living organism’ are still present, any such new production would be ‘instantly devoured or absorbed’ (presumably by bacteria, we would today have good reason to add), ‘which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed’. Darwin wrote this seven years after Louis Pasteur had said, in a lecture at the Sorbonne, ‘Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.’ The simple experiment was the one in which Pasteur showed, contrary to popular expectation at the time, that broth sealed off from access by micro-organisms would not spoil.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

Google’s “Prediction API” is increasing in sophistication and utility (we don’t know how broadly used it is). Those are extreme cases, but the basic pattern is seen in almost every data-rich firm. Once the data science capability has been developed for one application, other applications throughout the business become obvious. Louis Pasteur famously wrote, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Modern thinking on creativity focuses on the juxtaposition of a new way of thinking with a mind “saturated” with a particular problem. Working through case studies (either in theory or in practice) of data science applications helps prime the mind to see opportunities and connections to new problems that could benefit from data science.

Big Bang
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 2004

It would be all too easy to label scientists who have exploited serendipity as merely lucky, but that would be unfair. All these serendipitous scientists and inventors were able to build upon their chance observations only once they had accumulated enough knowledge to put them into context. As Louis Pasteur, who himself benefited from serendipity, put it: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’ Walpole also highlighted this in his original letter when he described serendipity as the result of ‘accidents and sagacity’. Furthermore, those who want to be touched by serendipity must be ready to embrace an opportunity when it presents itself, rather than merely brushing down their seed-covered trousers, pouring their failed superglue down the sink or abandoning a failed medical trial.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

Bradford DeLong, ‘Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the Twentieth Century’, 2000 NBER Working Paper No. 7602, p. 3. 22 Martin Arnold, ‘Profits of Buy-out Groups Tied to Debt’, Financial Times, 14 January 2009, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da3c8954-e217-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html. 23 Taken from Xavier Sala-i-Martin’s home page at Columbia University: http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/reject.htm. Consider these additional examples: Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, observed in 1872: ‘Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.’ Sir John Eric Ericksen, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1873, solemnly opined that ‘the abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon’. Most of the great advances of the late nineteenth century had their detractors – the electric light and the telephone were both predicted to have no future.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The most striking advance was in the war against death in childhood. In 1900, a tenth of children died in infancy. In some parts of the country, the figure was as high as one in four. In 2000, only one of about 150 babies died in their first year. Scientific advance played a role in this. The work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch led to the acceptance of the germ theory of disease and life-saving innovations such as pasteurized milk. Advancing knowledge led to better behavior: cities began to remove garbage, purify water supplies, and process sewage; citizens washed their hands and otherwise improved their personal habits.

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug
by Augustine Sedgewick
Published 6 Apr 2020

German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who described the conservation of energy in 1847, credited Goethe with anticipating the idea.14 In 1819, the seventy-year-old Goethe, once an avid coffee drinker, gave to a younger acquaintance whom he thought “quite promising”—a physician named Friedlieb Runge—a box of coffee beans from the port of Mocha and a challenge to figure out what was inside them, how they worked, what they did, what invisible connections they had to the wider world. At the time there was little clarity about the cause and nature of coffee’s effects on the human body: it had confounded centuries of medical thought based on the humoral system, and modern medicine was barely in its infancy—Louis Pasteur, for example, was not even born. Runge was up to Goethe’s challenge. After a few months of work, he isolated an alkaloid, a plant base, which he called Kaffeine—a compound of the German for “coffee” plus the suffix “ine,” from the Latin for “of the nature of.”15 For some time, the terms of this discovery were strictly enforced.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

Lifespans in the United Kingdom have more than doubled in the past 150 years, in no small part because of innovations that were made in direct response to the overcrowding in it that the early-nineteenth-century parliamentarian William Cobbett derisively called the Great Wen, a nickname that compared the city to a swelling, pus-filled, sebaceous cyst. The movement from miasmatic theory to germ theory, meanwhile, fundamentally shifted ideas about how to combat all sorts of other diseases, setting the stage for Louis Pasteur’s breakthroughs in fermentation, pasteurization, and vaccination. The ripples are manifold and can be measured, without the slightest hint of hyperbole, in hundreds of millions of human lives. If it hadn’t been for the advances that came out of that period of our history, billions upon billions of people would not be alive today.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

As Paul Samuelson wrote: ‘As the great Max Planck, himself the originator of the quantum theory in physics, has said, science makes progress funeral by funeral: the old are never converted by the new doctrines, they simply are replaced by a new generation.’ 15 Planck (like Samuelson, a man who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to paradigm shift) did not in fact say this, but he had expressed the sentiment in less pithy form. 16 The displacement of the narrative of miasma by the narrative of germs took several decades and in particular required the patient experimental work of the French scientist Louis Pasteur. As he edged towards the truth, Pasteur wrote ‘I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner’, famously adding ‘fortune favours the prepared mind’. 17 The willingness to challenge a narrative is a key element not only in scientific progress but in good decision-making.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
by Paul Stamets
Published 14 Apr 2005

By exploring these relationships, we may be able to adapt new techniques for controlling insects without harming the environment. In 1834, Agustino Bassi noticed that spores of the fungus Beauveria bassiana were causing the disease muscardine, a plague that imperiled the international silk trade. He is credited with conceiving “germ theory,” a major tenet of modern medicine, well before Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microbes in 1858. As more entomopathogenic fungi were observed, often found on the moldy carcasses of dead insects, the pesticide industry explored the use of fungal spores as natural insecticides. Since the 1990s, several patents have been awarded exploiting these mold fungi, raising expectations for treatments in the emerging field of entomopathogenic mycology.

Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg
by Lonely Planet

Since 2017, Antwerp also has an exciting new local pintje with ’t Eiland’s Seef, a carefully researched reincarnation of what had been one of Belgium’s oldest brews till the recipe was ‘lost’ after WWII. More associated with local grandmothers is elixir d’Anvers, a saccharin-sweet, bright-yellow liqueur made in Antwerp since 1863 and reputed to aid digestion – Louis Pasteur awarded it a diploma in 1887. From May to September, a number of summer pop-up bars open, some at the riverside, others in parks. This Is Antwerp (www.thisisantwerp.be) lists the current crop. At nightclubs, Thursdays tend to be cheaper (or free) for students. 6Centre Numerous old-world ‘brown cafes’ ooze atmosphere, including Grote Markt classic Den Engel (map Google map; www.cafedenengel.be; Grote Markt 3; h9am-2am), calm, mirror-panelled De Kat (map Google map; %03-233 08 92; www.facebook.com/cafeDeKat; Wolstraat 22; hnoon-2am Mon-Sat, 5pm-2am Sun), lively and inexpensive Pelikaan (map Google map; Melkmarkt 14; h8am-late), and several options that spread summer seating onto the tree-shaded square at Graanmarkt, notably De Duifkens (map Google map; Graanmarkt 5; h10am-late Mon-Thu, from noon Fri-Sun).

France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition)
by Nicola Williams
Published 14 Oct 2010

Although his urban dream was never realised, Ledoux’s semicircular saltworks is now listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Regular trains link Besançon and Arc-et- Senans (€6.10, 30 minutes, up to 10 daily). Route Pasteur Almost every single town in France has at least one street, square or garden named after Louis Pasteur, the great 19th-century chemist who invented pasteurisation and developed the first rabies vaccine. In the Jura, it is even more the case since the illustrious man was a local lad, born and raised in the region, and a regular visitor for holidays (he worked mostly in Paris). Pasteur was born in Dole, 20km west of Arc-et-Senans along the D472.

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His childhood home, La Maison Natale de Pasteur ( 03 84 72 20 61; www.musee-pasteur.com; 43 rue Pasteur; adult/student/under 12yr €5/3/free; 10am-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun Jul & Aug, 10am-noon & 2-6pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun Apr-Jun, Sep & Oct, 10am-noon & 2-6pm Sat & Sun Nov-Mar), overlooking the Canal des Tanneurs in the old town, is now an atmospheric museum housing letters, artefacts and exhibits including his university cap and gown. In 1827 the Pasteur family settled in the rural community of Arbois (population 3509), 35km east of Dole. His laboratory and workshops in Arbois are on display at La Maison de Louis Pasteur ( 03 84 66 11 72; 83 rue de Courcelles; adult/7-15yr €5.80/2.90; guided tours hourly 9.45-11.45am & 2-6pm Jun-Sep, 2.15-5.15pm Apr, May & 1-15 Oct). The house is still decorated with its original 19th-century fixtures and fittings. Route du Vin No visit to Arbois, the Jura wine capital, would be complete without a glass of vin jaune.

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Construction began in the 13th century, and was completed in 1451; the mismatched materials in some ways resemble Lego blocks. Above the north aisle are three lovely stained-glass windows, the oldest, in the Chapelle Saint Jérôme, dating from 1531. The entrance to the stately 13th-century cloister ( 9am-12.30pm & 2-6pm Jun-Sep, to 5pm Oct-May) is on place Louis Pasteur. MUSEUMS The seafaring history, traditions and cultural identity of the unique Basque people are all explored at the Musée Basque et de l’Histoire de Bayonne ( 05 59 59 08 98; www.musee-basque.com, in French; 37 quai des Corsaires; adult/student/under 18yr €5.50/3/free; 10am-6.30pm daily Jul & Aug, closed Mon Sep-Jun) through exhibits including a reconstructed farm and the interior of a typical etxe (home).

The Rough Guide to France (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Aug 2019

The surrounding vineyards illustrate the work of the local wine growers, while the cellars and galleries trace the changing methods of wine production over the years. The château also has wine-tasting sessions, which must be booked in advance (03 84 66 40 53). Maison de Louis Pasteur 83 rue de Courcelles • daily: Feb–April & Oct 2–6pm; May–Sept 9.30am–12.30pm & 2–6pm; guided tours hourly (May–Sept only) • €6.80 • 03 84 66 11 72, terredelouispasteur.fr At the far end of rue de Courcelles, just by the bridge, stands the Maison de Louis Pasteur, a former tannery and childhood home of the eponymous scientist, who, in 1885, discovered the rabies vaccine – indeed, a local nine-year-old boy by the name of Joseph Meister became the first, fortunate, recipient of the vaccine that same year.

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Tourist office 17 rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville (mid-June to mid-Sept Mon–Sat 9am–12.30pm & 1.30–6.30pm, Sun 10am–12.30pm & 3–5.30pm; mid-Sept to mid-June Mon–Sat 10am–12.30pm & 2–5.30pm; 03 84 66 55 50, arbois.com); staff can provide details of vineyards in the area that offer tasting sessions of local wine. ACCOMMODATION AND EATING La Balance Mets et Vins 47 rue de Courcelles 03 84 37 45 00, labalance.fr. Great-looking restaurant located on the main road close to Maison de Louis Pasteur, with copper-tinted walls and brick pillars running its length. The food, such as savagnin risotto with scallops and crispy asparagus, is terrific, while the chef here prepares many of his dishes with the local drink, for example, rooster with morels and vin de paille. Menus €20–65. Starters €16, mains €21.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

For those, it proved remarkably difficult to refute spontaneous generation experimentally. For instance, experiments could not be done in airtight containers in case air was necessary for spontaneous generation. But it was finally refuted by some ingenious experiments conducted by the biologist Louis Pasteur in 1859 – the same year in which Darwin published his theory of evolution. But experiment should never have been needed to convince scientists that spontaneous generation is a bad theory. A conjuring trick cannot have been performed by real magic – by the magician simply commanding events to happen – but must have been brought about by knowledge that was somehow created beforehand.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

.* Among the scores of physicists who took notice of Röntgen’s detection of X rays was Henri Becquerel, a third-generation student of phosphorescence who shared with his father and grandfather a fascination with anything that glowed in the dark. Becquerel’s discovery, like Röntgen’s, was accidental, though both illustrated the validity of Louis Pasteur’s dictum that chance favors the prepared mind. Between experiments in his laboratory in Paris, Becquerel stored some photographic plates wrapped in black paper in a drawer. A piece of uranium happened to be sitting on top of them. When Becquerel developed the plates several days later, he found that they had been imprinted, in total darkness, with an image of the lump of uranium.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century
by Alex Prud'Homme
Published 6 Jun 2011

Yet his glee is also a reminder of what is at stake every time we take a drink from the tap, wash off in the shower, hose our lawn, turn on the computer, douse a fire, or manufacture a computer chip. His exuberance at finding a new supply in a time of drought—“pure, clean and cold”—was also a sigh of relief, a shout of triumph over the primal terror of having nothing let to drink. Acknowledgments “Chance favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur said, and so it was with this book. I have always had a special fascination with water and have spent a lot of time in, on, and around it. But I didn’t think of writing a book about H2O until the day Julia Child and I shared a bottle of water at lunch. We were collaborating on her memoir, My Life in France, and she explained how the French consider spring water a healthy “digestive” and enjoy its mineral terroir, while Americans consider bottled water a refreshing “beverage” and prefer it without any taste.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.
Published 7 Sep 2015

It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-5 psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

In 1912 Henry Holmes of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education summed up the mood in a concise paragraph: As a movement for social justice democracy must make real the vision of Lincoln – ‘a fair chance and an unfettered start in life for every child’; must keep open ‘the road to talent’, which seemed to Napoleon the essence of the matter; must provide genuine equality of opportunity so that every man may be able, in the spirit of that superior definition which President Eliot [of Harvard] likes to quote from Louis Pasteur, ‘to make the most of himself for the common good’.33 In America, progressives updated Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of talents in terms of an ‘aristocracy of brains’ selected by scientific tests and promoted via a national education system. In Britain, they updated the intellectual aristocracy’s vision of a peaceful transfer of power from the old landed elite to a new aristocracy of talent.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

But even without unusual epidemics, the general pall of death that hung over every family didn’t began to dissolve until 1796. That year, British surgeon Edward Jenner discovered a vaccine for smallpox, a disease that used to knock back our numbers each year by the millions. Jenner’s cure was also the first vaccine for anything. It inspired nineteenth-century French chemist Louis Pasteur to develop others, against rabies and anthrax. Pasteur made two other key contributions to human survival. One was the familiar process our dairies still use. Pasteurization extended the shelf life of milk, which improved nutrition and reduced infections from pathogens such as salmonella and those causing scarlet fever, diphtheria, and tuberculosis.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 1 Jan 1999

He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country’s first regional plans. Above all, he was an artist who chose to work in a medium that then—even more than now—lacked public recognition. He was an innovator and a pioneer largely by chance. But, as Louis Pasteur, an exact contemporary of Olmsted, once observed, “Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.” Olmsted’s preparation was not based on formal training or education. What laid the groundwork for his later achievements was an amalgam of sensibility and temperament, coupled with an unusual set of formative experiences.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Source: Piramal Enterprises third quarter FY2016 results presentation, February 2016. I had been closely following Piramal for many months, but it was this tiny bit of information in one of its filings that was the catalyst for my investment at the attractive prevailing price. I subsequently realized a handsome profit. Louis Pasteur rightly said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” There is no alternative to hard work. CHAPTER 30 ACKNOWLEDGING THE ROLE OF LUCK, CHANCE, SERENDIPITY, AND RANDOMNESS We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance of occurrence of monstrous proportions.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry
Published 9 Feb 2004

At a time when no government funds went to research, as both chairman of the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and president—for thirty-two years—of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), he had also directed the flow of money from the two greatest philanthropic organizations in the country. And yet Welch had been no great pioneer even in his own field of medical research—no Louis Pasteur, no Robert Koch, no Paul Ehrlich, no Theobald Smith. He had generated no brilliant insights, made no magnificent discoveries, asked no deep and original questions, and left no significant legacy in the laboratory or in scientific papers. He did little work—a reasonable judge might say he did no work—so profound as to merit even membership in, much less the presidency of, the National Academy of Sciences.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

If Nordau had included “stare constantly at a blinking screen instead of living in the material world,” he would have been a prophet with a Nostradamus-like following, yet he seems to have been nearly alone with these trepidations, for everyone else in his era believed that scientific progress would solve all problems, fix all economies, end all war, and create a civilized, Edenic planet. Louis Pasteur referred to laboratories as temples of humanity, and a sensation running for three decades in both France and Italy was Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 Excelsior ballet, which chronicled the triumph of the Enlightenment over Darkness, ending with love, brotherhood, progress, and science. This fantasy ended in 1914, and as historian Barbara Tuchman noted, “A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age.”

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Ideas had little chance to encounter new mental environments; cultures of that time appear to have been incredibly traditionalist by modern standards. Slowly, as populations grew, ideas encountered new mental environments. People became more innovative and competitive about their innovations. A chance discovery led some cultures to switch from stone tools to metal tools—but as Louis Pasteur once said, chance favors the prepared mind. Writing, literacy, the printing press: these inventions allowed ideas to flow to millions of different mental environments. Each person became a test-bed for the usefulness of an idea. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there may have been only a few thousand people who really understood the usefulness of James Watt’s steam engine.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

Marglin implies that the British pretty quickly succeeded in replacing variolation with vaccination, but Sumit Guha, an Indian colleague who has also studied these matters, believes that it is unlikely that the British had either the personnel or the power to stamp out variolation so quickly. 49. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 77, cited in Marglin, "Losing Touch," p. 112. For the scientific career of vaccination and its application to anthrax and rabies, see Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 50. There were literally thousands of competitors for cures and preventatives, as there always are with diseases that seem incurable. 51. Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 144 (emphasis in original).

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

Oops, No It Isn’t: Why Clinical Research Can’t Guarantee the Right Medical Answers. Springer. Gawande, Atul, 2002, Complications: A Surgeon’s Note on an Imperfect Science. Picador. Geach, Peter, 1966, “Plato’s Euthyphro,” The Monist 50: 369–382. Geison, Gerald L., 1995, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gems, D., and L. Partridge, 2008, “Stress-Response Hormesis and Aging: That Which Does Not Kill Us Makes Us Stronger.” Cell Metabolism 7(3): 200–203. Gibbert, M. and P. Scranton, 2009, “Constraints as Sources of Radical Innovation? Insights from Jet Propulsion Development.”

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

The following tables are comprised of three columns: ingredient, cooking use, and sports/health use. In the last column, most notes are mine; any claims in quotations come directly from manufacturers and don’t represent our endorsements. If you don’t know a given term, skip it and we’ll cover it all later. And now, to a list fit for Louis Pasteur or Lou Ferrigno. Use it for cooking or performance/physique enhancement.4 All items can be found at fourhourchef.com/molecular. SKIP THIS TABLE IF IT STRESSES YOU OUT, M’KAY? ANTIOXIDANTS (SLOW DOWN OXIDATION REACTIONS) INGREDIENT: Ascorbic Acid (aka vitamin C) COOKING USE: Prevents browning of fruits and vegetables.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

His autopsy showed a similar pathology to the women with puerperal sepsis, leading Semmelweis to conclude that it was the doctors themselves who were causing the deaths of the mothers. Semmelweis implemented a strict hand-washing policy in his clinic, and the death rate quickly fell from 18 percent to 2.2 percent. But even Semmelweis himself couldn’t explain exactly why his method worked. It would be decades before Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease. Without this underlying explanation, Semmelweis’s discovery was largely rejected as a “mania.” Later in life, in part due to the lack of success he had in spreading his theories, Semmelweis fell into a deep depression, writing bitter letters to prominent European obstetricians in which he accused them of being ignorant murderers.

Fodor's Essential Israel
by Fodor's Travel Guides
Published 2 Aug 2023

The Jaffa $$$$ | HOTEL | Ultra-exclusive (and with a price tag to match), The Jaffa is the chicest of all Tel Aviv’s trendy new boutique hotels. Pros: Tel Aviv’s most Instagrammable hotel; dreamy pool with loungers; excellent dining and drinking options. Cons: not so easy on the wallet; quite far from the city center; more style than substance. D Rooms from: $750 E 2 Louis Pasteur St., Jaffa P 03/504–2000 wwww.marriott.com a 120 rooms X No Meals. H JOJO Boutique Hotel $ | HOTEL | If you’re looking for a budget accommodation that’s modern, clean, and well located, look no further than this modest, friendly hotel with eight rooms. Pros: super affordable and modern; friendly staff; spotlessly clean.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler
Published 17 Nov 2010

His family emigrated when he was seven and settled in New York, where Muni became a star on the Yiddish stage and later on Broadway. He came to Hollywood in 1929 and quickly won an Oscar nomination, but after a second film he returned to the stage. When he came back to Hollywood, starring in Scarface as a knockoff of Al Capone and in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and later as a Frenchman in The Story of Louis Pasteur, a Chinese in The Good Earth, and a Mexican in Juarez, he assumed stature as one of Hollywood’s most distinguished actors. At the same time his career became a paradigm for the tortured identity of the actor Jew in Hollywood—always dressed in someone else’s ethnicity. A man of almost desperate intensity and equally desperate loneliness, he was, according to his friend Hy Kraft, “one of the unhappiest men I ever met.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

The scion of a Wall Street rainmaker, the product of both Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he was less narrowly focused on the next technology than some of his engineer rivals, and more broadly interested in financial markets, business models, and even government policy. He read widely, theorized fluently, and wrote a series of internal papers codifying the Accel approach. It was he who had come up with the Accel watchword, “prepared mind,” having borrowed it from the nineteenth-century father of microbiology, Louis Pasteur. “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” Pasteur had observed sagely. Patterson was tall, slender, and possessed of a certain patrician eccentricity. He once surprised a new Accel recruit by serving him a dinner consisting of nothing but twelve ears of grilled corn and exceptional Bordeaux from his wine cellar.[10] Jim Swartz, for his part, contrasted just as much with Kleiner Perkins, but for different reasons.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

Their brother, Robert Wood (Johnson three), joined the firm shortly after its founding, infusing it with both a dose of needed capital and medical knowledge—the latter informed by the latest thinking in the then-fast-developing field of medical science. Johnson was one of the first American disciples of Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who, in developing the art of antiseptic surgery, successfully applied Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease to operating room practices. Johnson had become an advocate of antiseptics after attending a lecture given by Lister in 1876, at which the great scientist described the need for sterile surgical dressings to combat infection.1 One of the first products J&J introduced under Robert Wood’s leadership was sterile medicinal plasters (forerunner of Band-Aids), followed in subsequent years by ligatures, maternity and obstetric products, and the still-marketed Johnson’s Baby Powder.

The Rough Guide to Paris
by Rough Guides
Published 1 May 2023

The public is welcome at various exhibitions and concerts – book in advance. Behind Unesco, the avenue de Saxe continues the grand line southeast towards the giant Necker Hospital, passing through the place de Breteuil, a huge roundabout – even by Parisian standards – centred on a monument to Louis Pasteur, the much-loved inventor of pasteurization. His role as a hero who saved millions of lives is represented by the Grim Reaper cowering beneath him, while a healthy shepherd and cowherd attest to his pioneering work in the field of vaccinations. Musée du quai Branly 37 quai Branly, 7e • Charge; free on first Sun of the month • http://quaibranly.fr • MIéna/RER Pont de l’Alma A short distance upstream from the Eiffel Tower the Musée du quai Branly – the brainchild of President Chirac, whose passion for non-Western art helped secure funding – cuts a postmodern swathe along the riverbank.

The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook: A Master Baker's 300 Favorite Recipes for Perfect-Every-Time Bread-From Every Kind of Machine
by Beth Hensperger
Published 30 Apr 2000

Fast-acting yeast and bread machine yeast both work well in the bread machine; quick-rise yeast can also be used. The most readily available fast-acting or instant yeast comes from the S.I. Lasaffre Company (a French company operating in Belgium and elsewhere), which has been producing commercial yeast since Louis Pasteur figured out how to isolate and cultivate single strains. This yeast, labeled “SAF Perfect Rise” or “SAF Instant” yeast, is very popular among bread machine bakers. My testers and I nicknamed it the “industrial strength yeast” for its incredible and reliable rising power. Composed of a different strain of yeast than our domestic brands, SAF yeast is dried to a very low percentage of moisture and coated with ascorbic acid and a form of sugar, enabling it to activate immediately on contact with warm liquid.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published 16 Nov 2010

In the postsurgical wards of the Glasgow infirmary, Lister had again and again seen an angry red margin begin to spread out from the wound and then the skin seemed to rot from inside out, often followed by fever, pus, and a swift death (a bona fide “suppuration”). Lister thought of a distant, seemingly unrelated experiment. In Paris, Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist, had shown that meat broth left exposed to the air would soon turn turbid and begin to ferment, while meat broth sealed in a sterilized vacuum jar would remain clear. Based on these observations, Pasteur had made a bold claim: the turbidity was caused by the growth of invisible microorganisms—bacteria—that had fallen out of the air into the broth.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

After marrying Anheuser’s daughter, Busch ended up operating his father-in-law’s brewery. But brewing was not an especially difficult or capital-intensive business to get into. By definition, every brewery was micro. But several factors allowed German culture to scale beyond local confines. With Louis Pasteur’s discovery, pasteurization allowed for a longer shelf life, making wider distribution possible. Next, following the initial use of large blocks of winter ice, new innovations allowed for more refined techniques of refrigeration in railcars. Using both, Busch was one of the early pioneers in taking his beer farther west and south, all to avoid the large Milwaukee brewers fighting over Chicago and other midwestern markets.

Hunger: The Oldest Problem
by Martin Caparros
Published 14 Jan 2020

Like the Indian company Varun, which gives its workers, who used to own that land, thirty percent of the harvest, but of that thiry percent they are forced to sell seventy percent to the company at a price the company sets.” The journalists laughed, they gave each other complicit glances. It’s good when the bad guys are so obvious. Quoting Louis Pasteur, he told the journalists, “The facts only speak to you when you are ready to understand them.” He explained Pasteur was a chemist who found some incredible things in his microscope because he knew what to look for. He continued, “The important thing is to understand how the land grabs work, so you can recognize the facts they bring us, those we manage to obtain.”

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

After marrying Anheuser’s daughter, Busch ended up operating his father-in-law’s brewery. But brewing was not an especially difficult or capital-intensive business to get into. By definition, every brewery was micro. But several factors allowed German culture to scale beyond local confines. With Louis Pasteur’s discovery, pasteurization allowed for a longer shelf life, making wider distribution possible. Next, following the initial use of large blocks of winter ice, new innovations allowed for more refined techniques of refrigeration in railcars. Using both, Busch was one of the early pioneers in taking his beer farther west and south, all to avoid the large Milwaukee brewers fighting over Chicago and other midwestern markets.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

RAY: Well, if you're speaking for yourself, that's fine with 'me. But if you stay biological and don't reprogram your genes, you won't be around for very long to influence the debate. Nanotechnology: The Intersection of Information and the Physical World The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. —LOUIS PASTEUR But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately, in the great future, we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! —RICHARD FEYNMAN Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

Over the last couple of centuries some interesting observations and developments have been made, suggesting that molecular systems that do not contain specific information encoding molecules, such as DNA, are able to exhibit life-like properties. This field of research originates in the mid-nineteenth century when scientists were trying to disprove the notion of “vitalism.” This was a viewpoint championed by the eminent scientist Louis Pasteur, who argued that the living essence in organism was a “special” quality that was preformed and could not be created by physical means. A number of scholars disagreed proposing that life was “merely” chemistry and not “special”’ at all. Life-like qualities of chemical systems were demonstrated in non-biological systems as early as the latter half of the nineteenth century when nonliving systems exhibited some properties that appeared rather “biological” in their manifestation but were not based on cells, or even cell extracts.

Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The acclaimed Bat Sheva Dance Company (www.batsheva.co.il), founded by Martha Graham in 1964, is based at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Centre; it is led by celebrated choreographer Ohad Naharin (b 1952). The Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company (www.kcdc.co.il) performs around the country. For something completely different, catch a noisy, raucous, energetic performance by Jaffa-based Mayumana ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %03-681 1787; www.mayumana.com; 15 Louis Pasteur St), Israel’s answer to Stomp. In the realm of folk dancing, Israel is famous for the hora, brought from Romania by 19th-century immigrants. The best place to see folk dancing is at the Carmiel Dance Festival (www.karmielfestival.co.il), held over three days in early July in the central Galilee.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

From their positions with the lower limbs in correct anatomical relationship, it seemed that the whole skeleton had to be there, lying face downwards. Actually, it wasn't quite there but, after pondering the geological collapses in the area, Clarke deduced where it must be and, sure enough, Motsumi's chisel found it there. Clarke and his team were indeed lucky, but here we have a first-class example of that maxim of scientists since Louis Pasteur: 'Fortune favours the prepared mind.' Little Foot is still to be fully excavated, described and formally named, but preliminary reports suggest a spectacular find, rivalling Lucy in completeness but older. Although more human-like than chimpanzee-like, the big toe is more divergent than our toes.

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Although Cockran’s agile questioning exposed Edison’s basic ignorance of the physical factors involved in death by electricity, he could not overcome the inventor’s reputation as the authority on things electrical. The Wizard had become the oracle, and his views prevailed. On August 3 a satisfied Edison and his young wife embarked on a leisurely trip to Europe that turned into a triumphal march. Feted and decorated everywhere he went, Edison met such fellow luminaries as Louis Pasteur and Werner von Siemens.37 While Edison was gone, another sensation broke on August 25 in the form of revelations in the New York Sun under the headline “FOR SHAME, BROWN!” Somehow the paper had obtained forty-five letters, later revealed to have been purloined from Brown’s locked desk, that unmasked his relationship with the Edison interests.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

The sin of ingratitude may not have made the Top Seven, but according to Dante it consigns the sinners to the ninth circle of Hell, and that’s where post-1960s intellectual culture may find itself because of its amnesia for the conquerors of disease. It wasn’t always that way. When I was a boy, a popular literary genre for children was the heroic biography of a medical pioneer such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, William Osler, or Alexander Fleming. On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell
Published 31 Dec 1913

improvers: apprentices whose period of indenture had been reduced on account of their having some experience of the trade, or those who had moved beyond menial tasks and were being put to more skilled jobs. what Socialism means: ‘Half our time as champions of Socialism is wasted in denials of false descriptions of Socialism; and to a large extent the anger, the ridicule, and the argument of the opponents of Socialism are hurled against a Socialism which has no existence except in their own heated minds’: Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1893; 1895 edn.), 99. 7 Britons Never Shall Be Slaves: from ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740) by Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78). Blatchford used the line prominently and ironically in Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1906). disease germs: Louis Pasteur announced the connection between germs and disease in 1882. The building and decorating trades were unusually conscious of the fact since house design, materials, and furnishing changed in response. In Barrie’s Peter Pan (1905) the nurse Nana remains unconvinced by ‘this new-fangled talk about germs’.

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

It’s almost impossible to imagine someone coming up with a revolutionary new insight without being steeped in the domain in an obsessive or near-obsessive manner. But since we are encroaching on Chapter 8’s discussion of scientific discovery, suffice it to say for the moment that great physicists, great mathematicians, and great scientists of any stripe are invariably involved with great passion in their discipline. Louis Pasteur once famously observed that “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and obsessed minds are nothing if not prepared! Were their owners not passionately obsessed, they would never be able to spot connections that for a long time had escaped the eyes of all their colleagues. This brings us back to the idea, considered in the previous chapter, that creativity cannot be turned on and off with a simple switch: in order to come up with creative analogies, one has to be possessed by an idea.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist
Published 8 Oct 2012

ESSENTIAL ASYMMETRY ‘The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.’19 This remark of the French poet Paul Valéry is at one and the same time a brilliant insight into the nature of reality, and about as wrong as it is possible to be. In fact the universe has no ‘profound symmetry’ – rather, a profound asymmetry. More than a century ago Louis Pasteur wrote: ‘Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry of the universe … I can even imagine that all living species are primordially, in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry.’20 Since then physicists have deduced that asymmetry must have been a condition of the origin of the universe: it was the discrepancy between the amounts of matter and antimatter that enabled the material universe to come into existence at all, and for there to be something rather than nothing.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

You have done great work and we thank you.’” Carnegie, who had not known about the award and had prepared no remarks, spoke extemporaneously of his regard for France, its friendship with Scotland and the United States, and the wisdom of its people, who had in a recent vote, with millions of ballots cast, chosen Louis Pasteur as the hero of French civilization, relegating their greatest soldier, Napoleon, to seventh on the list.13 IN MID-MAY, much later than usual, the Carnegie family and servants sailed from New York Harbor for their annual trip to Britain. The sea air cured the “grip” he had been suffering from, Carnegie wrote Morley upon arriving at the Oatlands Hotel near Weybridge in Surrey, where the family was to stay for ten days.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
Published 17 Sep 2012

Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other.

The Art of Computer Programming
by Donald Ervin Knuth
Published 15 Jan 2001

Phys. 27,1 A987), 205-207]. The best lower bound known so far is due to J.-C. Lafon and S. Winograd, who showed that 2n2 — 1 nonscalar multiplications are necessary, and mn + ns + m — n — 1 in the m x n x s case ["A lower bound for the multiplicative complexity of the product of two matrices," Centre de Calcul, Univ. Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, 1979)]. If all calculations must be done without division, slightly better lower bounds were obtained by N. H. Bshouty [SICOMP 18 A989), 759-765], who proved that mxnby nx s matrix multiplication mod 2 requires at least Z}fc=o |_ms/2feJ + \{n + (n mod j))(n — (n mod j) — j) +n mod j multiplications when n > s > j > 1; setting m = n = s and j s* lgn gives 2.5n2 — ^nlgn + O(n).

Shantaram: A Novel
by Gregory David Roberts
Published 12 Oct 2004

One of the reasons I could remain for years on the run was that I love big cities, and feel completely confident and comfortable in them. The full range of a city boy’s suspicion and dread of the country rose up in me when I held that glass of freshly squeezed milk. It was warm to the touch. It smelled of the cow. There seemed to be things floating in the glass. I hesitated. I had the sense that Louis Pasteur was standing just behind me, looking over my shoulder at the glass. I could hear him. Er, I would boil that milk first, Monsieur, if I were you … I swallowed prejudice, fear, and the milk all at once, gulping it down as quickly as possible. The taste was not as bad as I’d expected it to be—creamy and rich, and with a hint of dried grasses within the bovine after-taste.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that Nature does not know it!