Louis Pasteur and Human Health

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the implications and applications of Pasteur's work extend into differing areas including human health and medicine and the food industries. The author points out that Pasteur alone was responsible for boosting and saving many of France's most important and lucrative industrial sectors such as wine, silk and farm animals. The paper relates that Pasteur's findings on germs and vaccinations are still applied to human medical practices today; he was the first to demonstrate that injecting small amounts of a weakened strain of bacteria would render an organism immune from this bacteria's detrimental effects.

From the Paper:

"Pasteur's first major discoveries related directly to France's wine industry. Though yeast was already known to be the precursor for fermentation processes, Pasteur developed a deeper understanding of the process of fermentation. For example, he noted that while yeast causes the primary fermentation of a substance into alcohol, unwanted germs and bacteria can cause the product to sour. Applying his research to both the wine and beer industries in France, Pasteur discovered that heating the products kills the germs and therefore prevents the formation of souring agents like lactic acid. His process, called pasteurization after the esteemed scientist, was quickly applied to milk. Pasteurization works especially on substances like wine, beer, and milk, which contain large quantities of sugars: When microorganisms invade those substances, they interact with the sugars to cause souring."

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