Yeast Comes to Life!
Today I learned about situational goodness.
Dubos, Rene. 1960. Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Most famous for his involvement in the development of germ theory and penicillin, Pasteur actually began work on his doctorate degree at the Ecole Normale Superieure studying crystallography. The lesson from Dubos is that Pasteur's career illustrates "that what an individual achieves in life depends less upon the circumstances in which he has to function than upon what he brings to bear upon them." Napoleon wrote in his diary that "no situation is good or bad in itself, everything depends upon what one makes out of it."
Dubos also reveals the crucial lesson for a scholar of any field, that Pasteur "demonstrated one of the most fundamental characteristics of the gifted experimenter: the ability to recognize an important problem, and to formulate it in terms amenable to experimentation." It takes a long time to be able to ask the right question, if only because so many questions have already been asked and responded to. But it is another thing altogether to ask a good question that is answerable with the skills and tools that the researcher has at their disposal.
Pasteur recognized in 1855 that what before were thought of as chemical catalysts in the fermentation process of making alcohol were actually living creatures (yeast) that were eating the sugars. He demonstrated that "fermentation is a phenomenon correlative of life," which represents the historically symbolic moment of the beginning of microbiology.
Observing the changes that occur in organic matter (putrefaction of meat, souring of milk, fermentation of grape juice, etc.) with this lens of little life forms moving all about, the question arose 'where did the microorganisms responsible for these changes originate?' The doctrine of spontaneous generation said that with each organism, there began a colony of microorganisms de novo. Others argued that in fact 'omnis cellula e cellula,' or only from cells arise cells.
Dubos, Rene. 1960. Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Most famous for his involvement in the development of germ theory and penicillin, Pasteur actually began work on his doctorate degree at the Ecole Normale Superieure studying crystallography. The lesson from Dubos is that Pasteur's career illustrates "that what an individual achieves in life depends less upon the circumstances in which he has to function than upon what he brings to bear upon them." Napoleon wrote in his diary that "no situation is good or bad in itself, everything depends upon what one makes out of it."
Dubos also reveals the crucial lesson for a scholar of any field, that Pasteur "demonstrated one of the most fundamental characteristics of the gifted experimenter: the ability to recognize an important problem, and to formulate it in terms amenable to experimentation." It takes a long time to be able to ask the right question, if only because so many questions have already been asked and responded to. But it is another thing altogether to ask a good question that is answerable with the skills and tools that the researcher has at their disposal.
Pasteur recognized in 1855 that what before were thought of as chemical catalysts in the fermentation process of making alcohol were actually living creatures (yeast) that were eating the sugars. He demonstrated that "fermentation is a phenomenon correlative of life," which represents the historically symbolic moment of the beginning of microbiology.
Observing the changes that occur in organic matter (putrefaction of meat, souring of milk, fermentation of grape juice, etc.) with this lens of little life forms moving all about, the question arose 'where did the microorganisms responsible for these changes originate?' The doctrine of spontaneous generation said that with each organism, there began a colony of microorganisms de novo. Others argued that in fact 'omnis cellula e cellula,' or only from cells arise cells.
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4:53 PM
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