The creation of the first overseas Pasteur Institute, or the beginning of Albert Calmette's Pastorian career.

Three years after the creation of the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1888), Albert Calmette, a French doctor in the Corps de Sante des Colonies, laid the foundations of its first overseas daughter institute in Cochin-China, a distant French colony. In fact, the Australian Pasteur Institute could also lay claim to be considered the first, as Pasteur's own nephew, Adrien Loir,' began plans for it as early as 1888. Nevertheless, the continuous presence of the Pasteur Institute in Indochina, which is still felt in the independent countries today, and the similarities between the strategies adopted by the Saigon Laboratory and other overseas centres made Calmette's mission a model for establishing the Institute abroad. The gateway opened by this enterprise for the study of tropical diseases is of fundamental importance. We must remember that the first "Pastorian mission" to go abroad was sent to Alexandria in 1883 to study cholera; Emile Roux, fellow doctor and friend of Pasteur from his early days and director of the Institute from 1904 until his death in 1933, took part in it. The French commission's failure, in the light of the discovery of the bacillus by Pasteur's German rival, Robert Koch, was one of the reasons that Pastorian research changed direction.2 The idea of the universality of "Pastorian science" developed around the study of the virulence of microbes, which produced in particular the rabies vaccine and thereby led to the consecration of the Institute. This notion went hand in hand with the near total belief in the treatment or prevention of infectious diseases, of which the colonies offered a wide range.3 It was no accident that Pasteur's first tropical institute was set up in Indochina. European scientists coveted territory in the Far East and Asia in general. The German school had its disciples in Japan, and the English, especially Patrick Manson in China,