In the early 1870s Pasteur had already acquired considerable renown and respect in France, and in 1873 he was elected as an associate member of the Académie de Médecine. Nonetheless, the medical establishment was reluctant to accept his germ theory of disease, primarily because it originated from a chemist. However, during the next decade, Pasteur developed the overall principle of vaccination and contributed to the foundation of immunology.
Pasteur’s first important discovery in the study of vaccination came in 1879 and concerned a disease called chicken cholera. (Today the bacteria that cause the disease are classified in the genus Pasteurella.) Pasteur said, “Chance only favours the prepared mind,” and it was chance observation through which he discovered that cultures of chicken cholera lost their pathogenicity and retained “attenuated” pathogenic characteristics over the course of many generations. He inoculated chickens with the attenuated form and demonstrated that the chickens were resistant to the fully virulent strain. From then on, Pasteur directed all his experimental work toward the problem of immunization and applied this principle to many other diseases.
Pasteur began investigating anthrax in 1879. At that time an anthrax epidemic in France and in some other parts of Europe had killed a large number of sheep, and the disease was attacking humans as well. German physician Robert Koch announced the isolation of the anthrax bacillus, which Pasteur confirmed. Koch and Pasteur independently provided definitive experimental evidence that the anthrax bacillus was indeed responsible for the infection. This firmly established the germ theory of disease, which then emerged as the fundamental concept underlying medical microbiology.
Pasteur wanted to apply the principle of vaccination to anthrax. He prepared attenuated cultures of the bacillus after determining the conditions that led to the organism’s loss of virulence. In the spring of 1881 he obtained financial support, mostly from farmers, to conduct a large-scale public experiment of anthrax immunization. The experiment took place in Pouilly-le-Fort, located on the southern outskirts of Paris. Pasteur immunized 70 farm animals, and the experiment was a complete success. The vaccination procedure involved two inoculations at intervals of 12 days with vaccines of different potencies. One vaccine, from a low-virulence culture, was given to half the sheep and was followed by a second vaccine from a more virulent culture than the first. Two weeks after these initial inoculations, both the vaccinated and control sheep were inoculated with a virulent strain of anthrax. Within a few days all the control sheep died, whereas all the vaccinated animals survived. This convinced many people that Pasteur’s work was indeed valid.
Following the success of the anthrax vaccination experiment, Pasteur focused on the microbial origins of disease. His investigations of animals infected by pathogenic microbes and his studies of the microbial mechanisms that cause harmful physiological effects in animals made him a pioneer in the field of infectiouspathology. It is often said that English surgeon Edward Jenner discovered vaccination and that Pasteur invented vaccines. Indeed, almost 90 years after Jenner initiated immunization against smallpox, Pasteur developed another vaccine—the first vaccine against rabies. He had decided to attack the problem of rabies in 1882, the year of his acceptance into the Académie Française. Rabies was a dreaded and horrible disease that had fascinated popular imagination for centuries because of its mysterious origin and the fear it generated. Conquering it would be Pasteur’s final endeavour.
Pasteur suspected that the agent that caused rabies was a microbe (the agent was later discovered to be a virus, a nonliving entity). It was too small to be seen under Pasteur’s microscope, and so experimentation with the disease demanded the development of entirely new methodologies. Pasteur chose to conduct his experiments using rabbits and transmitted the infectious agent from animal to animal by intracerebral inoculations until he obtained a stable preparation. In order to attenuate the invisible agent, he desiccated the spinal cords of infected animals until the preparation became almost nonvirulent. He realized later that, instead of creating an attenuated form of the agent, his treatment had actually neutralized it. (Pasteur perceived the neutralizing effect as a killing effect on the agent, since he suspected that the agent was a living organism.) Thus, rather unknowingly, he had produced, instead of attenuated live microorganisms, a neutralized agent and opened the way for the development of a second class of vaccines, known as inactivated vaccines.
On July 6, 1885, Pasteur vaccinated Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog. The vaccine was so successful that it brought immediate glory and fame to Pasteur. Hundreds of other bite victims throughout the world were subsequently saved by Pasteur’s vaccine, and the era of preventive medicine had begun. An international fund-raising campaign was launched to build the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the inauguration of which took place on November 14, 1888.
Implications of Pasteur’s work
The theoretical implications and practical importance of Pasteur’s work were immense. Pasteur once said, “There are no such things as pure and applied science; there are only science and the application of science.” Thus, once he established the theoretical basis of a given process, he investigated ways to further develop industrial applications. (As a result, he deposited a number of patents.)
However, Pasteur did not have enough time to explore all the practical aspects of his numerous theories. One of the most important theoretical implications of his later research, which emerged from his attenuation procedure for vaccines, is the concept that virulence is not a constant attribute but a variable property—a property that can be lost and later recovered. Virulence could be decreased, but Pasteur suspected that it could be increased as well. He believed that increased virulence was what gave rise to epidemics. In Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science (1950), American microbiologist René Dubos quoted Pasteur:
Thus, virulence appears in a new light which may be disturbing for the future of humanity unless nature, in its long evolution, has already had the occasions to produce all possible contagious diseases—a very unlikely assumption.
What is a microorganism that is innocuous to man or to a given animal species? It is a living being which does not possess the capacity to multiply in our body or in the body of the animal. But nothing proves that if the same microorganism should chance to come into contact with some other of the thousands of animal species in the Creation, it might invade it and render it sick. Its virulence might increase by repeated passages through that species, and might eventually affect man or domesticated animals. Thus might be brought about a new virulence and new contagions. I am much inclined to believe that such mechanisms would explain how smallpox, syphilis, plague, yellow fever, etc. have come about in the course of time, and how certain great epidemics appear once in a while.
After Pasteur’s 70th birthday, which was acknowledged by a large but solemn celebration at the Sorbonne that was attended by several prominent scientists, including British surgeon Joseph Lister, Pasteur’s health continued to deteriorate. His paralysis worsened, and he died on September 28, 1895. He was buried in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, but his remains were transferred to a Neo-Byzantine crypt at the Pasteur Institute in 1896.
During Pasteur’s career, he touched on many problems, but a simple description of his achievements does not do justice to the intensity and fullness of his life. He never accepted defeat, and he always tried to convince skeptics, though his impatience and intolerance were notorious when he believed that truth was on his side. Throughout his life he was an immensely effective observer and readily integrated relevant observations into conceptual schemes.