Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born 27 December 1822. Early work on sodium ammonium tartrate opened the field of optical isomerism, with implications that rippled through structural and medicinal chemistry. In 1862 the French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Alhumbert Prize for disproving spontaneous generation: sterilized sealed flasks stayed sterile, open ones grew microorganisms. That experiment fed his larger push for germ theory, then a minor idea, which his work on killing germs to prevent disease brought into clinical practice. He invented pasteurization to sto…