32 Microbes and You 



the French Academy awarded him in 1862 the prize they had 

 offered in 1860 to the first person who could prove or disprove 

 abioijenesis. 



One of the highHghts of Pasteur's hfe occurred on April 7, 1864, 

 when he deUvered his now-famous address at the Sorbonne in 

 Paris in defense of his disproof of spontaneous generation: "There 

 is no condition known today in which you can affirm that micro- 

 scopic beings come into the world without germs, without parents 

 like themselves. They who allege it have been the sport of illu- 

 sions, of ill-made experiments, vitiated by errors which they have 

 not been able to perceive, and have not known how to avoid." In 

 another passage he described how he watched his flasks, pleading 

 for them to g^ive him a sign of life, and could not . . . "for I have 

 kept from them, and am still keeping from them, that one thing 

 which is above the power of man to make; I have kept from them 

 the germs which float in the air; I have kept from them life." He 

 postulated his germ theory when he stated so concisely that life 

 is the crerm and the o;erm is life. 



THEORIES CONCERNING FERMENTATION 



Another overwhelming problem needing clarification and sound 

 proof before microbiology could become a firmly established sci- 

 ence was the riddle of fermentation. What initiates this change in 

 fruit juices and other sugar-containing substances, and what main- 

 tains the reaction? Is fermentation the same as decay? Once 

 bacteria had been discovered many persons pondered over the 

 question revolving around whether bacteria were the cause or the 

 direct result of fermentation. 



We can find Biblical references relative to the transmissibility 

 of ferments, including the "little leaven that leaveneth the whole 

 loaf." Since earliest times man has employed the process of fer- 

 mentation for making bread rise, for souring milk, and for making 

 alcoholic beverages without knowing how it all came about. Suc- 

 cesses and failures could never be explained. However, until the 

 nineteenth century was well along, we had little, if any, concrete 

 evidence on the matter. Cag^niard-Latour in 1836, Theodore 



