Joseph-Alexandre Auzias-Turenne, Louis Pasteur, and Early Concepts of Virulence, Attenuation, and Vaccination

JOSEPH-ALEXANDRE AUZIAS-TURENNE, LOUIS PASTEUR, AND EARLY CONCEPTS OF VIRULENCE, ATTENUATION, AND VACCINATION DONALD S. BURKE* Tout par la science et pour la science. Introduction Louis Pasteur, already famous for his work in chemistry, fermentation , and sterilization, first turned his attention to medical research in the late 1870s. Advances came only with difficulty for Pasteur and his team; deKruif characterized these initial forays as "mixed up, fumbling work" [I]. Then fortunes turned, and with incredible swiftness Pasteur and his colleagues developed effective vaccines for chicken cholera (1880), anthrax (1881), and rabies (1885). In his memoirs, 50 years later, Pasteur's nephew and lab assistant, Adrian Loir, wrote that Pasteur derived many of his medical ideas during this time directly from the scientific writings of Joseph-Alexandre Auzias-Turenne, a now obscure French syphilologist who died in 1870 [2]. Auzias' collected works, entitled La Syphilization, were published in 1878, and a copy was given to Pasteur by Loir. In his own memoirs, Loir claimed that Pasteur's fortuitous acquisition of Auzias' La Syphilization at this key juncture was a decisive factor in his subsequent successful development of a rabies vaccine. In this essay I examine Loir's contention that Auzias-Turenne had an important influence on Pasteur. The author is grateful to Gerry Geison, Bob Joy, Gerry Eddy, D. Haertl, Sibyl Goode, Pam Bell, Tina Durham, and Mary Hall, among others, for their discussions and assistance . The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army or the U.S. Department of Defense. *Division of Retrovirology, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 1600 East Gude Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20850. Reprint requests: Department of Academic Affairs, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC 20307-5100.© 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/95/3901-0941$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39, 2 ¦ Winter 1996 171 Fig. 1.—Photo Of Joseph-Alexandre Auzias-Turenne (photograph reproduced from the frontispiece in La Syphilization). Loir and Pasteur Adrian Loir, the son of Pasteur's wife's sister, became Pasteur's fulltime personal secretary and assistant as a young man in 1882. Fifty-four years later, after a distinguished career in medical research, he was asked by the now obscure journal Le Mouvement Sanitaire to collect his memories of "the Master" in a series of articles aptly entitled "In the Shadow of Pasteur." Over the next two years, Loir published a remarkable series of 19 articles, each 10 to 20 pages in length, covering a broad array of topics ranging from Pasteur's relationships with the press to his concerns about biological warfare. Loir's articles are of particular interest because—compared to the unrepentant adulation found in other Pasteur biographies—they offer refreshingly unvarnished profiles . However, Loir was already rather elderly when they were written, so some dates and details are hazy. It is the 11th of the Mouvement Sanitaire series, entitled "Pasteur's Medical Sources," that is of special relevance to this essay [2]. Loir relates that he was often asked "Where did Pasteur develop his medical ideas?" so he thought it worthwhile to review this topic. In the article Loir points out that Pasteur was "alone in the laboratory, without support, and without basic medical knowledge." 172 Donald S. Burke ¦ Joseph-Alexandre Auzias-Turenne and Pasteur Loir then immediately goes on to identify Auzias' La Syphilization as the most important source of Pasteur's medical ideas. Incredibly, he cites his gift of this book to Pasteur as a good example of the Master's own famous aphorism that "chance favors the prepared mind." Specifically , Loir says: "He was to receive an unhoped for chance; a chance that, as he later said, favored only a prepared mind" [2]. By this, Loir meant that Pasteur's acquisition of La Syphilization was the chance that had favored his prepared mind: "A number of his ideas were inspired by a book written by Dr. Auzias-Turenne: La Syphilization . . . The book was of great use to Pasteur. I had come to give this book to him at an opportune time" [2]. The circumstances whereby the book...