Book Review

Louis Pasteur

N Engl J Med 1999; 341:1777December 2, 1999

Article

Louis Pasteur
By Patrice Debré. Translated by Elborg Forster. 552 pp. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8018-5808-9

Louis Pasteur is one of the secular saints of France, as well as a hero of medicine and science of mythic stature. Books, plays, and poems have been written about him, and yet it is only recently that a critical historical appraisal of Pasteur and his work has begun. Partly because of his canonization, partly because of the former inaccessibility of his scientific records, and partly because his published works are often vague with respect to the details of his experiments, historians have not applied their analytic skills to Pasteur. There have been two standard biographies of Pasteur available in English for many years: The Life of Pasteur, by René Vallery-Radot, Pasteur's son-in-law (London: Constable and Company, 1911), and Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science, by René J. Dubos, the famous microbiologist at the Rockefeller Institute (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986). In The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), Gerald L. Geison analyzed several key periods in Pasteur's scientific life by reconstructing his daily activities in the laboratory on the basis of a careful study of the newly available evidence in Pasteur's own private notebooks. In addition, the French historian of science Bruno Latour has examined the influence of Pasteur on French science in The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

These fine studies managed to avoid the hagiographic approaches of the past and represent scholarly attempts to understand Pasteur and his work in the context of his time and culture. The books by Geison and Latour, however, have generated controversy, especially among scientists who resist any conclusion suggesting that Pasteur had a complex personality or that he might have been somewhat less saintly than we were taught in our youth.

Patrice Debré, a well-known French immunologist, now gives us a new biography of Pasteur, which appeared in French for the centennial of Pasteur's death and has now been translated into English. In contrast to the specific focus of the books by Geison and Latour, this new biography presents a full chronologic account of Pasteur's life. Debré makes liberal use of both Vallery-Radot's work and the newly available material. It is a stylish story that goes beyond previous biographies: it has the warmth and personal touches that make the earlier works endearing, if infuriating, yet Debré goes to some length to point out some of the controversies and complexities surrounding his subject.

Louis Pasteur tells the story of Pasteur's life with interesting personal details, and many passages from his correspondence enliven the book. Debré brings his broad knowledge of French medicine and science to his writing, so that we learn much about Pasteur's contemporaries and the French intellectual milieu in which he worked.

Although Debré suggests that his book will help readers come to their own conclusions about the controversies raised in the book by Geison by observing the experimental procedures of Pasteur, he provides very little detailed discussion or analysis of Pasteur's work. Pasteur himself rarely wrote about his experimental methods or procedures in his scientific papers. Indeed, he often simply stated his conclusions, without any description of the methods or procedures he used at all, indicating only that his conclusions were based on his carefully conducted research. Whereas Geison's work is based on the detailed reconstruction of Pasteur's experimental procedures and results through analysis of Pasteur's private laboratory notebooks, Debré presents very little such detail, so the reader is still left wondering, as after reading Pasteur's public statements, just what did Pasteur actually do?

Another of Debré's goals is to “find out what motivates [a scientist] to move from one project to another, to open up new areas of experimentation, and to pass from the known to the unknown.” This is perhaps the most fascinating and elusive goal in the writing of the history of science, and success is always incomplete. We are never able to escape completely from our own points of view, our own values, and our own psychological influences; thus our accounts of the work of others always contain traces of ourselves. What we see as motivations for our historical subject are, to some extent, what we think our motivations would be in similar circumstances. Thus, Debré often sees Pasteur's inspirations in terms of the scientific concepts of today. For example, early in his career, Pasteur worked in the laboratory of Jérôme Balard at the Ecole normale in Paris with Auguste Laurent, a visiting chemist from Bordeaux, and it was Laurent who introduced the young Pasteur to the mysteries of crystallography, a field in which Pasteur eventually made his first major research contributions. In Debré's account, Pasteur's interest in crystallography and his subsequent work resulted from the clear logic of science, following an unproblematic 19th-century intellectual program in chemistry. One day, however, Pasteur apparently just “gave up working on Laurent's experiments. A new chemical mixture led him toward another set of manipulations, on which he eventually based his dissertations.” But the reason he gave up on Laurent's experiments is not revealed, and the role these experiments had in Pasteur's new pathway of investigation, independent of Laurent, might illuminate the complex choices, intuitions, and research strategies that made Pasteur such a successful scientist. Geison saw this period in Pasteur's career as worthy of a full chapter in order to dissect out and expose the intricacies of the personal, professional, and social relationships involved.

Although we learn much from Debré's nicely told tale of Louis Pasteur, his story reinforces the impression that science is a simple search for truth, driven by its internal logic, which is understood and applied by the very best scientists. Occasionally, there are external events that influence the course of science: a distracting administrative job, competition for a coveted academic position, or a fortuitous chance to study a disease. But, on the whole, it is the interaction of the mind of the scientist with the natural world that is the engine of scientific progress. Although the view that science is simply a search for truth may be true at the most fundamental level, a critical inquiry calls out for more understanding of both mind and nature in the broadest contexts.

Louis Pasteur reads well, and Debré is a talented writer and storyteller, well served by his translator, Elborg Forster. Pasteur emerges from this book as a more complex figure than that drawn in the previous standard biographies, but some of the most important questions raised by Debré remain unanswered in the end.

William C. Summers, M.D., Ph.D.
Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520-8040