The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (review)

Are the idols of science at long last shown to have feet of clay, or is Gerald Geison a blasphemer whose words rightly call down upon him the judgment of damnation? Debating this question seems to have been a preoccupation of some responses—in the popular press and over seminar tables—to the instances of deception, misrepresentation, and ethically dubious human experimentation that Geison has disclosed by exploring The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. His revelations are powerful and could easily have provided the makings of a sensationalist exposé. But what we have instead is a bold, nuanced, beautifully crafted work of scholarship that has important implications both for our understanding of the doing of science and for biomedical historiography.

At the core of this study is Geison’s close scrutiny of Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks, a remarkably rich collection of more than one hundred volumes at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris that became accessible to scholars only in the mid-1970s. A meticulous reconstruction of what Pasteur actually did in the privacy of his laboratory offers a platform for re-evaluating the meaning of what he said in public. Geison is careful to point out that the use of laboratory notebooks (like the use of patient records) does not provide somehow privileged access to the “real” story, but instead offers a unique source of insight into practice that, in turn, demands and informs a rereading of the public record. It is by looking conjointly at Pasteur’s private behavior and his public performances that the historian is able to gain a fuller and more complex understanding of the ways in which Pasteur constructed scientific knowledge and persuaded the world of its worth.

After an opening chapter that gives a welcome overview of Pasteur’s life and work, Geison focuses closely on several nodal points in Pasteur’s career. Some of the significant alterations he makes to the reigning account of that career are the standard stuff of contextualist revisionism: in turning away from crystallography to study fermentation, and in his campaign against spontaneous generation, Pasteur, we are convincingly shown, was animated by political and religious commitments and expediencies. Other challenges to Pasteur’s own accounts are more pointed and disturbing. In reporting his discovery of optical isomers in the tartrates, the young Pasteur virtually obliterated all evidence of Auguste Laurent’s influence on his work, partly to distance himself from any taint of his mentor’s political radicalism. More striking is the deception revealed by the laboratory notebooks regarding Pasteur’s most celebrated public experiment, the 1881 anthrax vaccine trial at Pouilly-le-Fort: Pasteur deliberately misled both the public and the scientific community about the vaccine he gave to the 25 sheep who, unlike the 25 unvaccinated animals, lived. Having pinned his reputation to the promise of oxygen-attenuated vaccines, but yet to hit upon one that worked by the time a challenge compelled him to undertake the public experiment, Pasteur resorted to a chemically treated vaccine very similar to one advocated by his competitor, the veterinarian Jean-Joseph Toussaint. By misrepresenting the nature of his vaccine, Pasteur won credit for the triumph over anthrax, diverted attention from the labors of his rival, and gained time to develop an effective oxygen-attenuated vaccine.

Perhaps most unsettling is the private story behind Pasteur’s most famous accomplishment, the successful use of a rabies vaccine on a human. The heroic account of how in 1885 Pasteur, having tested his vaccine on dogs, first employed it to treat the young Joseph Meister is standard fare in any medical history survey course. In fact, however, Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks reveal that the successful vaccine trials on a large number of rabid dogs that he claimed to have performed had never taken place; further, the particular vaccine used on Meister had never been tried on animals at all. Moreover, the notebooks show that by the time Meister was treated, Pasteur had already used another rabies vaccine...