Louis Pasteur: Medicine’s New Dawn
By: Hamzah Jameel,
Staff Writer
Ugh! The antibiotics you take surely do not have a good taste. Have you ever wondered why you have to get those disgusting pills and force them in your esophagus when you are sick? Well, you surely have thought of that before. Antibiotics are the invention of the great French scientist who has changed human life and their way of thinking of those microscopic – definitely nasty – germs and bacteria spreading illnesses. Pasteur did not only invent that. Pasteurization is another contribution of his. But, what is pasteurization? The Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, the inventor of penicillin, caused our history and understanding of immunization and medicine to totally change. Thanks to his patience, hard work, and persistence, a lot of diseases no longer threaten people’s lives.
That white beard, wrinkle-handed old scientist held a flask containing chemicals. You must have asked what he was doing. He had enough patience to observe for hours; maybe observing wine, or maybe observing his old experiment of fungus on bread. No one knows exactly what, but everyone knows that he had the patience to conduct important experiments whether on pasteurization or on penicillin until he proved his theory. Under his scarce white hair, his dark eyes, as black as a bat in the dark, shone observing his invention. Patiently, he waited – so long until he reached an end. He worked very hard trying to reach to his goal of making the antibiotic, penicillin.
Once, Pasteur visited Monsieur Bigo, a factory that makes beer. Known for his hard work, Pasteur was asked to find why some beer became sour, and why others not, although both of them were made the same way. Under a microscope, he carefully watched what is happening. Germs! Germs roamed around causing the sourness. With his hard work, he came up with the process of heating liquids at a certain level to kill all the germs and bacteria in the process he made, “pasteurization.” You may have not heard of this word before, but in fact, the milk you drink in the morning has likely been “pasteurized.” This process is now applied to milk, and many other liquids.
In 1865, Pasture was again asked to investigate, this time with silk worm that has the disease of pébrine. With this disease affecting the silk worms, the silk would not be produced at a high rate. Working with perseverance, Pasteur managed to find the answers he needed. Louis now discovered that this disease was caused by a living organism. It was a bacterium – actually, billions, and trillions, or even googols of them – existing everywhere. Pasteur’s perseverance never took no for an answer.
Pasteur was patient, determined, and persistent. Whatever questions he had about medicine, Pasteur had to answer them. Don’t worry, germs are not in your milk – and that’s because of pasteurization. The next time you take an antibiotic, feel lucky, because your long-ago ancestors did not have such a life advantage. Thanks to our important scientist, Louis Pasteur, we are much healthier and immune than our ancestors were.