27 December: Louis Pasteur

This date in 1822 saw the birth of the scientist Louis Pasteur, known as a pioneer of the germ theory of disease, and for deveolping vaccines and the pasteurisation process. Here are some interesting facts about him.

1. He was born in Dole, eastern France. His father was Jean-Joseph, a tanner who had served in the Napoleonic Wars and received the Legion of Honour.
2. At school, he was an average student interested in fishing and art. As a teen, he drew portraits of his family and friends.
3. When he was 26 he married Marie Laurent, who became his assistant when he was carrying out his experiments.
4. The couple had five children but three of them died of typhoid, which may have been what inspired Pasteur to study disease and vaccinations.
5. In Pasteur's time, people believed that microbes and germs appeared out of nowhere. Pasteur's work was criticised because it went against this popular belief. The French Acadademy of Sciences, aware of the debate, decided to offer a prize to anyone who could prove whether or not microbes were spontaneously generated. Pasteur netted the 2,500 franc prize by showing that no micro-organisms grew in sterilised solutions when the air around them was sterilised, too.
6. We tend to associate pasteurisation with dairy products, but he first application of it was in the French Wine industry. If germs could spoil wine and Milk, he reasoned, perhaps they were also the cause of human diseases. He also did a lot of work on diseases affecting Silkworms.
7. He stole a method of vaccination from someone else. A vet by the name of Jean Joseph Henry Toussaint developed the vaccine for anthrax first, and shared his results with Pasteur. Pasteur went on to demonstrate the method in public, taking all the credit and even taking out a patent on it. In fact, stealing other people's ideas may have been something he made a habit of. He told his family never to reveal his notebooks to anyone and for years, they never did - but eventually his grandson donated them to the National Library of France so people could study them. While Pasteur certainly did make a significant contribution to science, he was apt to exaggerate how much of it was his own original work.
8. Pasteur's early work as a chemist involved studying the chemical properties of crystals.
9. An early demonstration of vaccination in humans was when Pasteur used a vaccine his colleague Emile Roux had developed for rabies. It had only ever been tested on Dogs. Pasteur used it on a nine year old boy, Joseph Meister, who'd been badly bitten by a rabid dog. What he did was strictly illegal, as Pasteur wasn't qualified as a doctor. Pasteur was lucky - his experiment worked and the boy survived. Had he not, Pasteur would have been prosecuted. As it was, he was hailed as a hero, although it has been suggested since that the likelihood of Meister developing rabies would only have been about 10% even if he hadn't been vaccinated.
10. Pasteur was a deeply religious man, who was a Christian as well as a scientist. While he did believe science and religion should be kept separate, he admitted that he used to pray while working in the laboratory, and that the more he studied nature, the more amazed he became at the works of the Creator.

Golden Thread

Terry Kennedy is inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the small town of Fiveswood as a place to live and work after university. He is sure he has never visited the town before, but when he arrives there, it seems oddly familiar.

Fiveswood has a rich and intriguing history. Local legends speak of giants, angels, wolves, a local Robin Hood, but most of all, a knight in golden armour. Fiveswood's history also has a dark side - mysterious deaths blamed on the plague, a ghostly black panther, and a landslide which buried the smugglers' caves.

Terry buys an apartment in The Heights, a house which has been empty for decades, since the previous owner disappeared. Now he has finally been declared dead, developers have moved in and turned it into six flats. Terry has the odd feeling he has lived in this enigmatic house before. But that is not all. Since childhood, Terry has had recurring, disturbing dreams which have been increasing in frequency so that now, he has them almost every night. To his dismay, the people from his nightmares are his new neighbours.

Except, that is, for Eleanor Millbrook. She is refreshingly unfamiliar. After Terry saves her from a mysterious attacker, they become close. However, Terry's nightmares encroach more and more on his waking life, until they lead him to a devastating discovery about who he really is.

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