Microorganisms - Connecting bacteria to disease
Connecting bacteria to disease
Van Leeuwenhoek's animalcules had an active life, scurrying around by means of small whip-like tails or by expelling streams of fluid. The bacteria he observed were quieter. They mostly lay about and multiplied. It was Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), a French chemist, who pieced together the connection between disease and these microorganisms.
In the 1850s, while Pasteur was a professor and dean at the University of Lille in France, he helped a man who wanted to know why some of his sugar-beet juice, which was being distilled for alcohol, was going bad. What Pasteur discovered were rodlike organisms in the bad batches. They were bacteria, which multiply quickly. In his experiment, he found that heat killed these microorganisms.
Pasteur applied his theory to the wine industry and showed wine growers in his hometown that bad-tasting wine occurred when bacteria fell into wine as it...
[The entire page is 331 words long]
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