[Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). A century later].

An overview of the amazing series of successive and diverse items worked on by the chemist and physicist Pasteur starts with the asymmetry of paratartrates, switches over to the fermentations and ends in the fight against diseases of invertebrates and vertebrates, including man. It is the wonderful story of an exceptional contribution to the advancement of knowledge, which was made possible by his keen observation skill, his rigorous and innovative methods and his careful judgement. A retrospective analysis of the inner man may impair somewhat the fame of Pasteur. He was a lonely man, in need of solitude to be able to make full use of his thinking capacity, foreboding secretiveness and shrewdness , which are contradictory to his careful writing down day after day of all the details of his thinking and research in his notebooks by now available to the scientific community. He was furthermore selfish, domineering, inflexible, impulsive and inclined to engage in endless controversies. But on the contrary his motivation to accept new assignments was subordinate to their public welfare value and as a rule he endeavoured to work on the problems in the field and in association with those concerned. He was courageous when struck by a cerebral hemorrhage at middle age, so that its aftermath hardly hampered his research activities. The dimness cast on his personality is not up to his pioneer role within a general conservative climate among the medical and even scientific profession, antagonistic to innovation. Pasteur has been a founder of stereochemistry, microbiology and its applications, immunology, bacterial vaccines, pasteurisation and a promotor of prevention and hygiene. These overwhelming achievements justify to keep alive the recognition of the outstanding stature of Pasteur.