Pasteur’s bicentenary is celebrated this year. Known for having developed the vaccine against rabies, Pasteur is a man who revolutionized medicine.
His discoveries on vaccination have also been very useful to us in dealing with the Covid. A fervent defender of hygiene, and in particular hand washing, Pasteur also played a role in the development of barrier gestures. It is said that he always had a bottle of hydroalcoholic gel in his bathroom.
Also passionate about wine, Pasteur managed to find a solution to preserve it from the germs that made it undrinkable. He also dedicated five years of his life to saving silkworms.
But who was really Pastor?
To trace the fate of the famous scientist, Sidonie Bonnec receives Maxime Schwartz, the former Director General of the Institut Pasteur. He is also the co-author of the book Pastor, the man and the scholar published by Tallandier.
Pasteur, the inventor of vaccines
If Edward Jenner invented vaccination, Louis Pasteur invented vaccines. The British doctor had discovered that human beings could be protected against smallpox by inoculating them with cowpox, a disease usually found in cattle, identical to smallpox, and yet benign in humans.
On this principle, Louis Pasteur used the infectious agents themselves to obtain immunizationaccording to processes that can be generalized to a large number of diseases such as chicken cholera or anthrax.
The rabies vaccine is special because rabies is not a microbe, but a virus. To develop this vaccine, Pasteur worked with rabbits and dogs. He preserved the virus by animal transfer, that is to say from rabbits to rabbits. To mitigate the virus contained in spinal cord of a rabbit who died of rage, he dried it for several days. He then ground it up and suspended it in a sterile liquid, before injecting it into the dogs.
The first to be vaccinated with this vaccine is Joseph Meistera young boy gravely bitten by a rabid dog. He never contracted the disease.