Louis Pasteur was most comfortable when working in a lab in Paris. There he had some of his biggest scientific triumphs, including experiments that helped him to confirm that bacteria could cause disease. “It all gets complicated from the lab,” he once complained to a friend.
However, in 1860, a few years before he became famous for developing a vaccine and heating milk to kill pathogens, Pasteur ventured to the top of a glacier in an astonishing quest for invisible life. did.
He and his guide began at the foot of Mont Blanc in the Alps and hiked through the dark stands of pine trees. Behind it, the mule carried a basket of long-necked glass chambers shaking with soup. They climbed the steep path until they reached Mel de Grace, an ice sea.
The wind blew violently over the glacier, and the veil echoed through the sound of frozen rock crashing down the slopes. Pasteur struggled to make a path within the glare of sunlight bouncing off the ice.
He finally stopped when the scientist reached an altitude of 2,000 meters. He removed one of the glass chambers from the mule pack and raised them over his head. With his free hand, he grabbed a pair of tongs and used them to fall off the edge of his neck. Cold air rushed into the container.
The sight of Pasteur holding a globe of soup on his head would have confusing other travelers visiting Mel de Grace that day. If they had asked him what he was doing, his answer might have looked angry. Pasteur was hunting, he later wrote for “floating bacteria in the air.”
Now, 165 years later, scientists around the world are searching for floating bacteria. Some studies have studied how the coronavirus drifts through buses and restaurants. Lots of fungi can travel thousands of miles and infect people and plants. The ocean supplies microorganisms into the air whenever they collide. Even the clouds that scientists recognize are alive with microorganisms.
The sky ecosystem is known as the aerobiome. On Pasteur's Day, there was no name. The very idea of ​​a living creature floating in the air was just too strange to imagine.
However, Pasteur began to wonder about the possibilities of living in the air when he was a little known chemist teaching at the University of Lille in France. There, his student's father approached him for help. The man owns a distillery where he used yeast to convert beet juice into alcohol. However, the juice was inexplicably intense.
Examining the liquid under a microscope, Pasteur discovered a dark stick (bacteria, not yeast) in sour vats. This discovery helped him to solve the theory of fermentation. Microorganisms absorbed nutrients and produced new compounds. Depending on the species, you can turn butter rancid or grape juice into wine.
This discovery won Pasteur, the prestigious new post in Paris. In his explanation of the discovery, Pasteur suggested passing the bacteria that they might have floated in the air and settled in Vat. The concept won him an angry letter from Felix Archmed Pouche, one of France's leading naturalists.
Pouchet informed that the microorganism Pasteur discovered, Pasteur, had not fallen into the vats from the air. Instead, beet juice was spontaneously produced. “A spontaneous generation is the production of a new, organized being that lacks parents, and all of its primitive elements have been drawn from the surrounding issues,” Pouchet previously wrote.
Pasteur calmly replied that Porthette's spontaneous production experiments were fatally flawed. The conflict between Pasteur and Portchet encouraged the French Academy of Sciences to present a contest for the best research dealing with whether a voluntary generation is authentic or not. What began as a private spat has turned into a public view. Pasteur and Pouche have signed up to compete for the 2,500 franc award.
The public continued to be enthusiastic about competition and struggled to imagine how to look at life either way. The spontaneous generation had a whim of blasphemy. If life could exist, then no divine intervention was necessary. However, Pasteur's claim that the bacteria-filled atmosphere was tense in the minds of the 19th century. A French journalist told Pasteur that he was about to lose the contest. “The world you want to take us with is really amazing,” he said.
To prove his world was authentic, Pasteur tried to pick bacteria from the air. Working with Glassblowers, he created a flask with narrow openings that stretched a few inches. He filled them with sterile soup and waited to see if anything would grow inside. If the neck is pointed straight up, the soup is often cloudy with microorganisms. However, when he tilted his head so that the opening was pointed down, the soup remained clear. Pasteur argued that although bacteria in the air could float in the flask, they were unable to follow the ascending path.
When Pouchet heard of the Pasteur experiment, he sneered. Did Pasteur really believe that all the reproductive substances of decaying organic matter came from the air? If that were true, every cubic millimeter of air would have been packed with more bacteria than all people on Earth. “The air we live in will mostly have a density of iron,” Pouche said.
Pasteur responded by changing his hypothesis. The bacteria were not everywhere, he said. Instead, they drifted into the clouds that were more common in some places than elsewhere.
To prove his point, Pasteur pulls out his straight neck flask from his lab and begins collecting bacteria. In the courtyard of the Paris Observatory, all of his 11 flasks were cloudy, doubling the grind. However, when he traveled to the countryside and conducted experiments again, many of his flasks remained barren. The farther Pasteur was obtained from human settlements, creating a small air of life. To put that idea into an extreme test, Pasteur decided to climb Mel de Grace.
His first foray into the glacier ended with a failure. After lifting the flask, he tried to use the flames from the lamp to close his neck, but the glare of the sun made the flames seem unseen. As Pasteur fumbled around the lamp, he worried that he might have contaminated the soup with the bacteria that carried the skin and tools. He gave up and ran to the small mountain lodge at night.
He kept his flask open while he was asleep. In the morning they were full of microorganisms. Pasteur concluded that the lodge was packed with airy bacteria brought by tourists from around the world.
Later that day, Pasteur fixed his lamp, making the flame burn bright enough to see it under the glacial sun. The experiment worked perfectly when he climbed the Mer de Glace. Only one of the flasks clouded with bacteria. The other 19 remained barren.
In November 1860, Pasteur arrived at the Academy of Sciences in Paris with 73 flasks he used on his trip. He entered the domed auditorium, walked to the table where the awards committee sat and laid out the flask. The judges stared at the soup as Pasteur explained his evidence and said it gave him “obscure evidence” of the bacteria floating in his settlement.
Pouche refused to accept the evidence, but still withdrew from the contest. Pasteur won the award.
Still, the two continued to spar. The rivalry is so intense that the academy has established a new committee to evaluate the latest experiments. Pouchet dragged out the lawsuit and demanded more time for his research.
Pasteur seized public opinion and decided to put on the spectacle. On the evening of April 7, 1864, in an amphitheater filled with elites in Paris, Pasteur was surrounded by lab equipment and lamps for projecting images onto screens. He told the audience he wouldn't leave such a person without realizing that the air was present in invisible bacteria. “We can't see them now, for the same reason we can't see the stars during the day,” he said.
At Pasteur's command, the light went out and saved money except for the cone of light that revealed a floating moat of dust. Pasteur asked the audience to imagine the dusty rain falling on every surface of the amphitheater. The dust was alive, he said.
Pasteur then used a pump to drive air through the sterile cotton. After soaking the cotton in the water, he placed the drops under the microscope. He projected the image onto the screen for the audience to see. Along the soot and plaster pieces, they were able to make corpusules that would turn over. “These, gentlemen, are bacteria that are microscopically present,” Pasteur said.
The bacteria were everywhere in the air, he said – kicking up with dust, flying at unknown distances, then back to the ground, they cast a spell of fermentation. Bacteria have broken “everything on the surface of this earth in the general economy of creation that once built life,” Pasteur said.
“This role is immeasurable, wonderful, positively moving,” he added.
The lecture ended with a standing ovation. The hunt for Pasteur, a floating bacteria, took him to the highest stage of French science.
By the time he passed away 31 years later, Pasteur had made so many world-changing discoveries that many of his tributes and obituaries mentioned his trip to Mer de Glace. Not there.
But scientists today recognize that Pasteur has first glimpse into the world where they are only beginning to understand. They now know that life infuses the atmosphere all the way into the stratosphere than he could have imagined. Our thriving aerobiome has led some scientists to argue that alien aerobiomes could float in clouds on other planets. It's not the only world that seems incredibly amazing.
