Was Pasteur's work solely about preventing spoilage?
While my initial investigations into fermentation and the spoilage of wine and beer were driven by practical concerns for French industry, they led to a far more profound revelation. The same microscopic agents responsible for souring wine were also found to cause diseases in humans and animals. My experiments demonstrated that these 'germs' were the etiological agents of many ailments, not some nebulous miasma or internal imbalance. This was the crucial extension to the germ theory of disease.
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