THE HISTORY OF MICROBIOLOGY begins with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. This curious man designed and built simple microscopes and opened a whole new world to man. His discoveries went underground for 200 years with a few others revealing more of the unseen world, but with no major advances. Time was waiting. Then the time became ripe in the last half of the 19th century and on the stage stepped two great men, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur.

Koch and van Leeuwenhoek will be objects of future blogs, but Louis Pasteur was probably the greatest of the three. Trained as a chemist, he backed into the area of microbiology and with Koch, began a revolution in medicine that continues to this day. Pasteur got his start with “diseases” of beer and wine; diseases that proved to be the contamination by unwanted bacteria, the butyric acid producing bacteria. They not only produced bad flavors but the also made the products smell bad. This is where the first use of what we call pasteurization began.

But among the anti-science Luddites, Pasteur is famous for “disproving spontaneous generation”. After all, everyone knows this and because he disproved it evolution could not have occurred. I have seen this argument on many occasions so it cannot be the figment of one person’s altered reality. Indeed I can see, based on the pathetic state of math/science education in this country, some High School teacher saying “Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation”.

But did Pasteur actually disprove spontaneous generation? Absolutely not, for the following reasons:

1. It is virtually impossible to prove a negative assertion in science. Most scientists would not even try. It is simply not possible to test every possibility, especially considering the number of variables. Pasteur only tested a few sets of conditions.

2. His experiments were not of a negative nature. They were positive. What he showed was that broths became turbid with microbial growth because there were microbes in air. Finally the discoveries of van Leeuwenhoek began to be studied in earnest. His experiments put Needham’s assertions to rest. There still exists today at the Institute of Pasteur swan necked flasks, sealed, of Pasteur that are still sterile (about the only decent reason for going to France).

Anti-science Luddites and especially anti-evolitionists love Pasteur because he “makes evolution impossible”. Now Darwin and all subsequent scientists who study evolution alway make it clear that they don’t know where, when or how the first living thing came to be and that evolution only describes life processes after that event, but that inconvenient fact is routinely ignored by the Luddites.

Someday, hopefully in my lifetime, some scientist somewhere will produce a life form from a primordial soup and then the Luddites will have something real to howl about, but until then, NO, PASTEUR DID NOT DISPROVE SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. All he showed was that bacteria were present in air and could contaminate anything that came into contact with air.