Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Next time you pour yourself some cereal or scoop a bowl of ice cream, take a close look at the label on the milk carton or the tub of ice cream. You'll likely notice the word pasteurized. Two centuries ago this year, on December 27th, a poor tanner family in Dole, France gave birth to a son. Mr. And Mrs. Pasteur decided to name their son Louis. Hello, I'm Eric Anderson and I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Ann Gager to our show today as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great French scientist Louis Pasteur. Gager is a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and has published papers on the waiting time problem and testing the limits of protein evolution. She holds a degree in biology from MIT, a PhD in zoology from the University of Washington, and carried out postdoc work at Harvard in molecular biology where she cloned the gene for kinesin light chain. Welcome, Anne.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Hello Eric. It's good to be here.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: So Ann, let's say I know nothing about this prominent scientist and I ask you, who was Louis Pasteur? What would you say?
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Well, that would depend on what you know, what your field is because he did so many things. He's just a remarkable scientist. He contributed to bacteriology, he contributed to medicine, immunology, chemistry. Just a ton of different new ideas.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: The things that he showed in those various fields.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah, he started out actually he wasn't a very good student. He was interested in art at first and liked to sketch portraits and his family really thought they were very good. But he decided finally that they this wasn't a way to earn a living. So he switched to chemistry. He had been interested in chemistry before, but then he discovered that in order to get into the school he wanted to go to, he would have to pass an exam at a certain level.
And he didn't do it the first time. That meant he had to go back to class, go through all the classes again and then take the exam again. He, he passed, but not at a high level. So he went back and did it again and passed at a high enough level to get into the actual school. But he was very competitive and he wanted to have a high mark. So he went back a third time.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Lesson in persistence, if nothing else.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: So he finally got into the school and succeeded in his work. He attracted the attention of a lot of senior, well known scientist because of his dedication and his hard work and his original ideas. He wasn't afraid to go after the big questions. So he had a number of mentors who actually helped him get positions as he went on.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: So in terms of Pasteur's contributions, tell me a little bit about, you know, let's say you're. You're a chemist or a silk maker or. He contributed to a lot of fields, didn't he?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Interesting. He contributed to chemistry. That was his first project. He knew about this discovery that certain chemicals could change the direction of light. When you shone light through a bottle of the chemistry, it's called polarization. And he was interested in what the basis of that was. And so he was looking at crystals under a microscope of, I believe it was tartrate, and discovered that the crystals came in two forms, two directions, left and right handed. And he very patiently went through the solution under the microscope and sorted the chem. The crystals out left and right handed from each other and solved the problem of stereochemistry, at least started it. It was a big discovery. He attracted a lot of attention for it. Then he went on. He was asked by the sugar makers in his neighborhood, his country, they were having problems with their fermentations to produce beet sugar going bad. So he looked in his microscope and discovered that besides the yeast that were responsible for the fermentation, which he by the way proved, there were also contaminating microorganisms and found that he could get rid of them by the process of pasteurization. He did this with beets and then later with wine and beer. Members from the Guild for Wine and the Guild for Beer approached Pasteur and asked if they could solve their problems because they were having problems with their beer going bad and their wine going bad, and they were losing business as a result. So he came and looked and found that they indeed were contaminated with these microorganisms besides the yeast and used pasteurization dissolves. Solve the problem there. He rescued the industry, let's put it this way, and he won prizes for it. He got a lot of attention in the French ministries because he was actually making a difference in these industries. So having realized that microorganisms were causing problems in wine making and in beer making and in sugar making, this gave him the idea that microorganisms were also responsible for what was called spontaneous generation at the time. And spontaneous generation was the idea that if you left food out, it would eventually grow worms and mold and all kinds of things on the. On the food. And so people had tested to see if they could eliminate this by covering it with gauze or various other procedures. But if it was open to the air or open to flies, then it would always generate new organisms. So people had this idea that the spontaneous generation from nothing to something was the way that things originally had started. Pasteur didn't believe it. So he had this idea that if he could keep a flask open to the air but prevent things from falling in, he could demonstrate that nothing would grow. And he made these swan necked flasks he got, got help from a friend and they made swan neck flasks that had these long necks that were curved over and then came back up. So it was a sort of a, an S shaped neck. And he put broth in, heated it, boiled it for a time to sterilize it, and then let it cool and let the stuff sit. And it, it went weeks without growing anything. Then being very thorough, tilted the broth so that it entered into the curve at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the curve where dust would have collected and then, and put the brass back into the bottom of the bottle and let it sit and it grew, it grew organisms. So his theory was that the dust in the air carried organisms and the more dust there was, the more organisms would grow.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: And that if you prevented that, then there was no.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: That's right. If there was nothing falling into the broth, then nothing would grow. And he succeeded in doing it with still leaving the flask open to the air, in a sense.
So that had been the thing that had kept them from declaring against spontaneous generation. Other scientists couldn't do it with, with keeping it open to the air.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Right, okay. Yeah. And this, and this of course was really a landmark and was something that Darwin was very interested in because he was trying to understand after he had written the Origin of Life, which he didn't really talk about the origin of. Excuse me, after he'd written the Origin of Species, he didn't really talk about the origin of life in there, but he was very interested in the topic and had some conversations and correspondence with his friend Joseph Hooker right after Pasture's experiments. And that's where he started speculating on, well, okay, Pasteur showed that it doesn't work, but maybe on the early Earth in some warm little pond where we get that phrase, you know, maybe, maybe it could have worked to them. And so this, this Pasteur's demonstration was very central to Darwin's continued speculation on that topic. And frankly, where the industry's gone today.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: If I could ask Pasteur what he thought of Darwin, it would be an interest question.
[00:08:58] Speaker B: Do you have any idea or you're.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Saying, I'm not sure. I think he probably had his doubts, but he didn't go against the prevailing opinion. There were a lot of scientists who didn't think that Darwin was correct at the time, so.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Well, tell us a little bit about his early years. Okay, yeah, yeah. Where he grew up and, you know, you mentioned his education briefly.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Dole, France. And that was where he was born. And then he moved to another area in the same region. He had a normal childhood. His family was poor, but they really valued education and did what they could. And Pasteur showed promise. So he received scholarships to schools to permit him to go to the best schools. And he was lucky that way all along.
He found people who would sponsor him.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And then after he. You mentioned his efforts and his tenacity and taking the exam three times and getting into the desired school he wanted. And then later he met Maria. Is it Maria that he married?
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Marie. Sorry. And she was devoted to pastor and really promoted his work at the time.
Scientists got very little funding from their academic positions, and so Pasteur had to fund his own research, which means that Marie had to be involved. She had to be able to manage a household on less money and also be willing to let him put in the long hours necessary for his work. And she actually served as an amanuensis for him in his laboratory. She would go in and take notes and copy his results into notebooks and make sure that everything was kept in order.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: No, that's the word amanuensis. I'm not sure I've heard that.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: What's that mean? She served as his secretary, the one who wrote what he dictated and what was going on in the lab to make sure that it was accurate.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Right. Okay. So she was not only supportive of his work, but actually participating in it and helping him out.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Yeah. They didn't have an easy time at the beginning. They weren't earning much, and he had to work in basements and libraries.
Not libraries. Attics. Wherever he could find space. And he had to convert it to a lab each time. They moved a number of times to different institutions. He kept moving on up and. Yeah. Until finally he got to a place where they'd actually provide him space and money.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Right. Okay. And they probably have a young family.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: They had five children, but unfortunately, three of them died. It was common for the period that children. A fair number of them would die before reaching adulthood.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you know. I don't know if you know this or if there's any information on it, but do you think that his experience of having three of his children die in. In childhood spurred some of his efforts in terms of bacteriology, I don't know.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: It could be. But the thing I find interesting is that he didn't have the same reaction that Darwin did when his children died.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Ah, tell us what you mean by that. I know what you mean, but. Yeah, tell us. Just.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Well, Darwin had one of his daughters die and he really. What's the word? Saddened. More than saddened.
He was turned bitter by that. He lost his view of the world as a good place and he lost his faith in God is my opinion. And I mean, there are people who will dispute that, but by the end of his life, he had lost his ability to even taste the beauty of things. He couldn't hear music and appreciate it or read poetry and appreciate it anymore because he had given up on the goodness of life in. In essence, as opposed.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yeah, and. And that was. That was by his own admission, right, that he said, I can't, I. I don't even.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Pastor, on the other hand, was quite clear that he had belief in God and some of his quotes bear that out. He was faithful to the end. And I think, I think. Well, I can't say for sure that this enlightened his work, but it certainly kept him from becoming bitter. He worked to the very end.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Okay, so one of the other things, in addition to the spontaneous generation experiment, which is incredibly famous, one of the more additionally. Excuse me. One of the other things that was perhaps at least as famous was his work on rabies and the Pasteur Institute that he found.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Well, first of all, he had the idea that because of the lack of spontaneous generation, that the thing that caused all of these processes were the microbes that he had identified.
So he had the idea that perhaps the microbes were responsible for disease. And he set out to identify the disease causing microbes, as he called them, for a number of diseases. And he identified the bacteria responsible for anthrax and for typhoid and a few others and was able to demonstrate that they were indeed by isolating them from the organisms, growing them, culture and then reinfecting and saw that the disease was produced. This led to the idea that in order to keep disease from spreading, we needed to use antiseptic septic conditions. Semmelweis took it up and tried to promote it among medical doctors and was roundly rejected by his colleagues. They didn't accept what he did and he actually died in a mental asylum. I think they put him there because of what he was Saying Lister was successful in England in promoting the idea that doctors needed to wash their hands thoroughly and use sterile technique, avoid the introduction of micro. Microbes into medical situations.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: So was this. That was this the fellow in the ward where the, the women were.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it was child childbirth fever.
So that was a major, major advance for medicine. And in fact, it's a funny story, Pasteur became a germaphobe.
He saw bacteria everywhere, and so he would. He wouldn't shake hands with anybody.
Even the Napoleon III wouldn't shake hands because he was so aware of the possibility of disease organisms. So those were all bacterial diseases that he. Because you can bacterium, you can identify their structures, you can be sure that you've got the right organism. You can't see in the microscope.
There was an interesting story. They had been working on a disease in rabbits called cholera. It's a rabbit version of it. They were culturing the disease, passaging it through the rabbits so that would be grow the disease in one rabbit, harvest the bacteria, grow them again in another rabbit and another rabbit and another rabbit. And this was part of the demonstration that the organism caused the disease. And they had a culture, they went away on vacation. And he told his assistant to start an inoculation with fresh broth into the rabbit. And the assistant forgot. And when they got back, of course, the, the culture was old and he was going to throw it away, but Pastor said, wait. And he injected the rabbits and they got sick, but they didn't die. And so he had the idea that perhaps if he repeated the procedure and injected them again, he would be able to make the rabbits more and more resistant to the bacteria. And so then finally, he tested the rabbits to see if they could withstand the full strength unattenuated bacteria. And they were immune. It was the development of the first vaccine other than cowpox. Cowpox was discovered by another scientist. He had found that if you inoculated someone with cowpox, you would become immune to smallpox, which was a big, big deal. So this attenuated solution that they used for inoculation, Pasteur decided to call it a vaccine in honor of Jenner and his work.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Okay. And then talk to us about rabies.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Because rabies was of great interest to Pasteur because he had seen people in his own village die of rabies. And it's quite a horrible death. Rabies was a big problem for everybody around the world because rabid animals, rabid dogs, caused all kinds of injury and death. And nobody had a cure for it. There was no way to treat it. So Pasteur had this idea that he could make a vaccine against rabies, but he couldn't do it by looking through the microscope to verify that he had the virus in culture. It was a virus, not a bacterium. Viruses are too small to see under the microscope. So. But he thought if he could use the same attenuation process, he would be able to make a vaccine. But because he couldn't isolate the bacteria, he had to do it in a different way. He would take the neural tissue of, I believe it was rabbits, they were culturing it through and try and let the neural tissue sit out open to the air, and then repeat, repeat, repeat through multiple serial inoculations. And he was hoping that would cause the attenuation of the virus. It proved not to be sufficient. They needed to use a chemical method to weaken the virus. But he was testing it in dogs. But he hadn't absolutely proven that the vaccine he was making was able to prevent rabies from developing. That's another thing. Nobody wants to get vaccinated for rabies beforehand only if you've been bitten, because it's a long series of inoculations you have to have. So two people had come to him and asked for these inoculations. One was they were both showing symptoms of rabies. One was so far gone that the inoculations didn't help. And the other, I believe, died of a second disease. So that hadn't been successful. But a young boy came to him and his parents asked for him to be inoculated because he had bitten, mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur made the decision to go ahead and give the boy inoculations, a series of inoculations, starting with the weakest and then getting it stronger and stronger over time. The boy yet didn't have symptoms yet. So this was a true test. If you could take someone who had been infected but hadn't developed the disease, if you could prevent the disease by vaccination. So this is actually a different thing. You're preventing the disease from developing when it's already there. And he succeeded. The boys survived. And because of that, he got. Pasteur got so much recognition around the world, people were just overawed that there would be a way to handle rabies. Pasteur continued to work on the question and improve the vaccines over a long period of time. He dedicated his research to that going forward, and it gave him international recognition. He received just about every scientific award you can conceive of.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Well, sounds like a lot of critical advancements. I Do want to mention, as you and I were talking a little bit earlier, I suppose, like all of us, he wasn't perfect.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Though there was some controversy when he was alive, There were critics of his work who claimed that he had stolen their methods without giving them credit. For example, the procedure to weaken the rabies vaccine. And beyond that, he had a rival in the German scientist Frederick Koch, who was the father of the germ theory that allowed you to prove precisely what disease, what microorganism is responsible for producing the disease. He had a set of four rules that you had to meet, four criteria that you had to meet to say that the bacterium was responsible for a disease. He's very thorough. Now, Pasteur had already inaugurated this idea of germ theory by his demonstrations with earlier diseases, but he hadn't been quite as thorough as Koch. And so they had these arguments where they criticized each other back and forth in the scientific literature.
Now, the question about his scientific reputation. He told his family that not to release his lab notebooks after his death, and they obeyed. After he died, they kept the notebooks sequestered, and it wasn't until his last living descendant had the notebooks, and then he turned them over to the Institut Pasteur, and they held the notebooks for a while and then opened them up for research by scientific historians, etc. And one historian went through the notebooks very, very thoroughly and compared the notes to the published results. And he found that Pasteur didn't always write down exactly what he had done. He had written in his scientific literature that his publications for scientific journals, etc. That he did one thing, but the notes showed he did another. For example, in the rabies inoculations, he used a culture that had been treated differently than what was in his written scientific papers, which is a problem. This is a violation of what scientists are supposed to do. They're supposed to report their exact methods so that it can be reproduced by other scientists. Pasteur had a habit of trying to keep things secret so he could. He could. He could maintain the ability to be the only one able to produce rabies vaccine of high quality. So unfortunately.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Well, that habit unfortunately continues with some today, but hopefully not as often.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: I think that he probably knew what he was doing and regretted it.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: So I know that he expressed regret or said that. Well, he. He said that scientists should have high standards. But he also said there is a time in every man's life when he looks to his God, when he looks at his life, when he wonders how he will be remembered. But he was just a really productive scientist to make breakthroughs in chemistry in identifying the cause of disease in microbiology, the idea that organisms, microorganisms, were responsible for disease was a major breakthrough, really huge then in terms of discovering the basis of fermentation, which is a fundamental process that looney things do, that was a really big thing. And then the development of vaccines. We owe him a lot.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And so one of the things that, if I got my dates correct, I think he had a stroke when he was actually in his.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: It was. He was quite young, 68, that he had his stroke.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So he would have been just in his mid-40s, but he continued to work for, gosh, another 20 years. Right.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: He had several strokes. The first one made him paralyzed on one side, but he continued to work in the lab. He had a number of assistants who helped him with his work, and they themselves are names known to scientists. So. And then finally, a series of strokes at the end of his life made it impossible for him to leave his bed. But in a book written by one of his. I think it was one of his sons or sons in law, who had been around at the time, this was all ago, all going on, and gave a firsthand account of the end of Pasteur's life. Said that people came from everywhere, scientists, colleagues, students, friends, and like, they were making pilgrimages to visit Pasteur at the end of his life. And he said that Pasteur was greatly loved, that he may have been stern in outward appearance, but he was generous and kind, and his students recognized that. So an interesting life. Very interesting life.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. Well, share with us as we. As we get toward the end here, and share with us a few of the things that maybe Pasteur gave us. Insight into his own personal views from some of the quotes, whether it's relating to his scientific work or maybe his individual views.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: One of the things I find amusing is he says, one must not assume that an understanding of science is present in those who borrow the language.
And in light of his understanding of microbes and their significant roles in things like making wine and bread and in causing disease, he says the role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely great. He was famous for saying chance favors the prepared mind.
He says, the more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God. And another version of that says, a little science takes one away from God, but more science brings one closer to God. That's a paraphrase, because I can't find the quote Right in front of me.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. That reminds me of some other. There's another trying to remember who it was, another famous scientist that said something similar.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Do not put forward anything that you cannot prove by experimentation. That's a. That's a good quote. Let's see. The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so. Yeah, that would be probably something he said in connection with spontaneous generation, because he kept running into these resistances in his work where he would find something that he knew to be true and no one would believe him. And so. And so he would have to have these grand demonstrations to people before they would take him seriously, such as spontaneous generation. When he created the anthrax vaccine, people didn't believe him. So he had a large demonstration where he inoculated half of a herd of sheep with his vaccine and left the others untreated. Then he let the whole herd graze on a field that was contaminated with anthrax, and his inoculated sheep survived, and the others all died. Now, this was a public demonstration with reporters and everything.
So it was a big deal. And the same with the rabies vaccination. The first with the. With the boy, that was a big deal. It was public. Everybody would know whether the boy lived or died. Everybody was interested. It was big news.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah, sure. That would have been huge. I mean, it's such a fearsome disease at the time, too. Just. All right. Well, Ant, this has been really great. Any final thoughts on Pasteur as we celebrate 200,000 years old?
[00:29:54] Speaker A: He's a complex man, an interesting man, because he had such devotion and focus and dedication and creativity, too. Like I said, he went after the biggest problems in science at the time and was successful.
He took risks. And can I tell you one, One more story? All right. The silkworm problem. France had a very large and profitable industry in making silk. They would grow the silkworms on mulberry leaves and then harvest the cocoons and make the silk out of those cocoons. Well, the industry had been struck by two different diseases. They didn't know it was two separate diseases. But Pasteur came along and figured it out that there were two different diseases that were causing, and he found a way to identify which animals were infected. So he told them that they needed to separate the sick from the, well, caterpillars and that this was the way to do it. Well, the silkworm farmers refused. They said it's too hard and it's, you know, how do you know that, that will work anyway, so Pasteur said, even a child can do it. And he set a girl down to the task and asked her to separate the sick from the well. And she did. And then they grew the caterpillars. And it turned out that the sick ones died and the well ones that she had sorted out were fine. But that still wasn't enough to convince them. So Napoleon III gave Pasteur the rights to take over a silkworm farm that had been.
Had been shut down because of the disease.
And it was a large, large farm. And Pasteur made the outrageous claim that he would make that farm profitable within one year.
So, oh, boy. He ordered clean, uncontaminated silkworms from probably China. They came, and he started the. The farm up using fresh mulberry leaves, I presume, because they don't want to have the leaves contaminated. Just having a sick caterpillar eat on the same leaf would spread the disease.
So his. His steward, so I suppose you could use that word, the one responsible for the orders tried to steal some of those caterpillars and trade them for sick caterpillars. And of course, what happened? Some of them got sick. Pasteur was really irate. He figured out what had happened, fired the steward and then got caterpillars that weren't carrying disease and started over. By the end of the year, it was a huge project. He had to bring in workers from all over. And by the end of the year, he had made the. The farm more than just profitable. It was hugely profitable. And then the silkworm farmers took him seriously.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Yes. Sometimes you have to show the economic benefit.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: So he was. He was prone to these giant demonstration.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: That's great. That's great. Well, Anne, thank you so much for being with us today for the 200th anniversary of Pasteur's birth and to help us understand so much more about his important work. My pleasure with us today. Thank you for joining us for this episode of ID the Future. To hear more about the evidence for design in nature, join us again here at ID the Future or on our sister YouTube channel, Discovery Science. And as always, consider sharing a link with a friend for ID the Future. I'm Eric Anderson. Thanks for listening.
Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign.
[00:34:01] Speaker A: Org.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
