The Private Science of Louis Pasteur By Gerald L. Geison (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. By Gerald L. Geison. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 378. $29.95. How do you like your medical history? Do you like your heroes pure? Their reputations unsullied? In other words, are you a fan of hagiography? If so, this may not be the book for you. If, on the other hand, you see the creation of new scientific and medical knowledge as a process worthy of careful, analytic study, tins volume will not disappoint. In this long-awaited book, Gerald Geison, a noted historian of science, presents an elegantly crafted, important analysis of one of the most significant figures in the history of science and medicine, Louis Pasteur. The standard, sainted story of Pasteur is well known. How Pasteur searched for truth when none would hear of it. How he persisted in the face of ignorance, superstition , and a stifling religious climate. How his discoveries saved the lives of innumerable people. Perhaps none of the persons helped by Pasteur was more notable than the nine-year-old peasant boyJoseph Meister, saved from rabies by a new vaccination process, a process that saved the lives of countless others. So goeth the standard story. In large part as a result of Geison's earlier work, historians have long known that this mythology is seriously incomplete. In his current volume Geison takes the study to a different level, both in the scale of his analysis and in the public attention this book has received. Both are important. After a quick summary of the essential elements of Pasteur's life, Geison turns to Pasteur's previously suppressed laboratory notebooks to reconstruct five of the most crucial scientific experiments of modern times, all of which have been widely discussed by historians ofscience. They include Pasteur's work on optical isomers in the tartrates, his study offermentation, his debate over the existence ofspontaneous generation, his work on an anthrax vaccine, and his very public use of a rabies vaccine. In each case study, Geison shows that the public face Pasteur placed on the experiments was very different than what is to be found in his notebooks. Take the case of anthrax vaccine. In 1881 Pasteur showed that 25 vaccinated sheep survived injection with anthrax while another 25 unvaccinated sheep died of the disease . However, the notebooks reveal that Pasteur misrepresented his method of preparing the vaccine in order to be able to claim credit (and priority) in the face of competition from another investigator. Perhaps more important—and certainly more famous—is the case of rabies vaccine . Pasteur carefully drafted his public accounts of the experiment in order to conceal the fact that his methods did not conform to what were then generally accepted standards for experimentation with human beings, standards that Pasteur himselfhad recently endorsed. Pasteur suggested that the vaccine he used on young Meister had been successfully tested on a "large number of dogs." In fact, Pasteur Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 40, 2 ¦ Winter 1997 | 303 had only barely started to experiment with the vaccine before using it on the young boy who had been bitten. But what difference does this make? Didn't the boy survive? This type of question is one of many that have been asked about the book. Some reviewers have been frankly protective of individuals—"How dare Geison criticize my hero!" (The subtext is, perhaps, that if Pasteur can be criticized, so can anyone else.) Some have been protective of disciplines—"If Geison thinks this is easy, perhaps he should try to do the experiments himself." (The subtext is, perhaps, that only scientists can criticize other scientists.) Neither of these objections, in this reviewer's estimation, is highly relevant. Some objections have been progressivist—"What difference does it make, Pasteur was right, and that's all that counts." Perhaps so, at least according to our late-20th conceptualization of biology, but if the study of science is to be meaningful, we need to understand the process of knowledge creation as well as its outcome. The most important type of critical discourse relates to the somewhat more reasoned objection that "Maybe Pasteur's notebooks tell a different story...