The private science of Louis Pasteur

Gerald Geison's superb study of Louis Pasteur comes at a time of mounting hysteria over the supposedly anti-scientific intent of much history and sociology of science. In such a climate, there is a danger that a book which sets out to show that Pasteur's "scientific beliefs and modus operandi were sometimes profoundly shaped by his personal concerns, including his political, philosophical, and religious instincts" (p. 4), and which argues, moreover, that, on occasion, Pasteur deliberately published misleading accounts of the work that led up to some of his most important scientific discoveries, will be dismissed out of hand by the anti-sociology lobby. Anyone who takes the time to read Geison's judicious, meticulous and carefully argued book will be forced to reassess such charges. The private science ofLouis Pasteur makes abundantly clear the extent to which a thoroughly social understanding of Pasteur's science is compatible with a deep admiration for the skill and dedication that he brought to his work, and for the immense fruitfulness of the research programmes that he initiated. It does so, however, while providing a much-needed corrective to some of the uncritically adulatory tales that have hitherto been told about Pasteur's life and work. Pasteur has been the subject of much mythmaking. Thanks to the stories that he, his colleagues and his biographers told about his endeavours, he has been hailed by posterity, not just as an outstanding scientist, but as something of a moral paragon-"the most prefect man who has ever entered the Kingdom of Science . a man whose spiritual life was no less admirable than his scientific life", as one hagiographer put it (Stephen Paget, 1910, quoted at pp. 265-6). Such myths have played a powerfully ideological role in consolidating the social authority that scientists currently enjoy. But they have also tended to conceal much of the story of how scientists such as Pasteur actually acquired their pre-eminent role in the culture of their time. Geison sets out to de-mythologize Pasteur by providing a series of detailed studies of key episodes in his rise to scientific pre-eminence, based on a careful analysis of Pasteur's own laboratory notebooks as well as his published work. He begins with Pasteur's earliest major discovery-that optical activity among the tartrates was correlated with their ability to produce asymmetric crystals. Thereafter, he goes on to discuss Pasteur's work on fermentation and on spontaneous generation, and his later success in developing first an effective anthrax vaccine, then a vaccine to treat rabies. Throughout these chapters, Geison shows how Pasteur's experimental work was inspired and informed, on the one hand by his desire to vindicate a deeply held assumption that vital processes differed qualitatively from non-living physical and chemical processes, and on the other hand by his more pragmatic concern to produce effective new medical technologies. Geison is particularly interested in the way Pasteur prepared his findings for public consumption. A detailed reading of Pasteur's published experimental reports reveals the extent to which published accounts of his work often glossed over or concealed the actual processes of thinking and experimentation recorded in his private notebooks. Geison demonstrates how Pasteur commonly edited his own experimental results to include in the public record only those which supported his own preconceived ideas, and how he explained away contrary findings-his own and others' as the results of faulty experimental methods. As Geison stresses in his introductory chapter, such rhetorical techniques are a nonnal part of the process of preparing scientific findings for public discussion; indeed, they are essential if