Louis Pasteur, fermentation, and a rival

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, IN August 1857, Louis Pasteur gave a lecture to the Société des Sciences de Lille entitled ‘Lactate fermentation’, published soon after as a Mémoire. The title may sound unexciting, but this historic paper marked Pasteur’s first statement of a germ theory and a specific role for microorganisms in metabolic processes. Pasteur was then 34 and professor of chemistry and dean of the new Faculté des Sciences in Lille (Fig. 1), in the heart of the sugar beet growing region of northern France. Pasteur’s appointment was in part intended to give help to industrialists in Lille, but the opening sentence of his paper makes clear that he was led to consider fermentations following his researches on the amyl alcohols and their remarkable crystallographic properties. His studies on fermentations led to a protracted dispute with a contemporary, Antoine Béchamp, over the priority of his findings which, remarkably, is maintained to this day and with which the latter part of this article deals.