The Act of Creation (100 page)

Here is humility and wonder, and a sense of participation which transcends
not only the individual self but the collective pride of homo sapiens.
The Faith of Pasteur
Louis Pasteur's character and life is an almost perfect illustration of
ambition, pride, vanity, self-righteousness, combined with self-sacrifice,
charity, humility, romanticism, and religion, to make a happy balance of
opposites. At the height of his fame, Pasteur related with evident relish
that at an official reception the Queen of Denmark and the Queen of Greece
had broken etiquette by walking up to him to pay their homage. But he
also spent several months every year for five years in the mountains of
Cevennes, to find a cure for an epidemic disease of silkworms. When he
had found its cause, and saved the French silk manufacturing industry
from ruin, the Minister of Agriculture sent him for examination three
lots of eggs which a famous silk-worm breeder was distributing throughout
the country, ignoring Pasteur's recommendations of his method to obtain
healthy strains. Pasteur replied:

M. le Ministre -- These three samples of seed are worthless. . . . They
will in every instance succumb to corpuscle disease. . . . For my part
I feel so sure of what I affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test,
by hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown
them into the river.

And to a sceptical breeder, he wrote about the same time:

M. le Marquis -- You do not know the first word of my investigations,
of their results, of the principles which they have established, and
of their practical implications. Most of them you have not read . . .
and the others you did not understand.

In his polemics against scientific adversaries he used the same
impassioned language -- the style sometimes reminds one of Galileo. But,
unlike Galileo, he engaged in controversy only after he had established
his case beyond all possible doubt in his experimental laboratory, and
had hardened it by countless painstaking repetitions. As a result, again
unlike Galileo, he was invariably, and to his opponents infuriatingly,
proven right. He even wrote an article in the Galilean dialogue style
for a wine-growers trade journal. The dialogue was meant to be a report
of Pasteur's conversation with the mayor of Volnay, M. Boillot -- which
resulted in the conversion of M. Boillot to the Pasteurization of Burgundy
wines. This epic dialogue starts with:

Pasteur: Do you heat your wines, M. Maire?
M. Boillot: No sir. . . . I have been told that heating may affect
unfavourably the taste of our great wines.
Pasteur: Yes, I know. In fact it has been said that to heat these
wines is equivalent to an amputation. Will you be good enough, M. Maire,
to follow me into my experimental cellar?

For the next two pages M. Boillot is shown what's what. He has to taste
the treated and untreated wines of a score of vintages and vineyards,
until he capitulates and admits the superior quality of the pasteurized
wines -- including those which came from his own vineyards:

M. Boillot: I am overwhelmed. I have the same impression as if I
were seeing you pouring gold into our country.
Pasteur: There you are, my dear countrymen, busy with politics,
elections, superficial reading of newspapers but neglecting the
serious books which deal with matters of importance to the welfare
of the country. . . . And yet, M. Maire, had you read with attention,
you could have recognized that everything I wrote was based on precise
facts, official reports, degustations by the most competent experts,
whereas my opponents had nothing to offer but assertions without proof.
M. Boillot: . . . Do not worry, Monsieur. From now on I shall no
longer believe those who contradict you and I shall attend to the matter
of heating the wines as soon as I return to Volnay. [24]

Pasteur had grown up in the Arbois; he was a connoisseur of wine, and he
despised beer. But after the defeat of France by the Prussians in 1871,
he considered it his patriotic duty to improve the quality of French
beer -- with the declared intention to produce a 'bière de la revanche',
superior to the Germans' cherished national drink. He even invaded,
armed with his microscope, the sacred premises of Whitbread's in London;
his laconic account of that historic visit makes one appreciate the
drama that took place.
Pasteur was reverently handed two casks of the famed brew. He put a drop
of one under the microscope and -- 'I immediately recognized three or four
disease filaments in the microscopic field. These findings made me bold
enough to state in the presence of the master-brewer, who had been called
in, that these beers would rapidly spoil . . . and that they must already
be somewhat defective in taste, on which point everyone agreed, although
after long hesitation. I attributed this hesitation to the natural reserve
of a manufacturer whom one compels to declare that his merchandise is
not beyond reproach. When I returned to the same brewery less than a
week later, I learned that the managers had made haste to acquire a
microscope.' It was not the least of the miracles that Pasteur achieved.
Silkworms, wine, beer -- and before that studies on the souring of milk,
the turning of wine into vinegar, of vinegar into acid, of beet-sugar into
alcohol. 'Louis . . . is now up to his neck in beet-juice', Madame Pasteur
complained in a letter. Each of these campaigns was conducted with the
same crusading zeal, the same showmanship, the same patience and precision
in method. Pasteur's father had been a sergeant in the Napoleonic army;
after Waterloo he had become a tanner in the Arbois. He had probably
heard the Emperor's famous speech at the Pyramids: 'Soldiers, from these
summits forty centuries look down upon you.' Louis Pasteur, crouching
with his microscope on top of one of the gigantic vats at Whitbread's,
may have spoken the same words to the awe-stricken master-brewers.
And that is hardly an exaggeration, for in Pasteur's work we see clearly
how the trivial by a short step can lead to the momentous, and how the
two are inextricably mixed up in the scientist's mind and motives. One
of the landmarks of science is the publication, in 1877, of Pasteur's
book with the unprepossessing title,
Etudes sur la Bière,
Ses Maladies, Les Causes qui les Provoquent. Procédé pour
la Rendre Inalterable
. . . followed, almost as an afterthought, by
. . .
Avec une Théorie Nouvelle de la Fermentation
.
It contains the first complete statement of Pasteur's revolutionary
discovery that yeast and all other agents which cause fermentation
and putrefaction, are living beings of very small size -- that is,
micro-organisms, germs. In a similar way, his work on the silkworms had
confirmed that contagious diseases were caused by microbes of different
varieties. The principles of sterilization and partial sterilization
('pasteurization'); of immunization, of antisepsis and asepsis;
our knowledge of the causative agents of disease and of the general
conditions which determine the organism's receptivity for those agents;
lastly, the 'domestication' of microbes and their use as antibiotics --
all this grew out of Pasteur's often far-fetched researches into some
specific technical problem, undertaken for apparently trivial motives.
Yet there were other motivational factors at work which lent urgency and
drive to each of these technical research projects, from the earliest
(
On the Turning of Milk
) onward: the intuitive vision of a grand
unitary design underlying all biochemical transformations, a design which
embraced not only the utilization of energy by living organisms in health
and disease, but also -- as we shall see in a moment -- the secret of
the origin of life. And finally, each particular project -- whether it
was concerned with silkworms, wine, or the inoculation of cattle against
anthrax -- though carried through with consummate showmanship and a Gallic
flourish, was nevertheless a crusade for the public benefit; the resulting
self-gratification was no more than a delicious by-product. Through the
same interaction of the trivial and monumental which led to Pasteur's
intellectual triumphs, the proponent of the
bière de la
revanche
became the greatest benefactor of mankind since Hippocrates.
I have mentioned Pasteur's hope to discover 'the secret of life'. This
is to be taken quite literally.
The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all
his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic
of living organisms -- in other words, the fact that the molecules of
living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical,
are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other -- or like
right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to
the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the fight; life substances are thus
'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know;
but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic
is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'.

I am on the verge of mysteries, and the veil which covers
them is getting thinner and thinner. The night seems to me too
long. . . . Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry
of the universe. . . . The universe is asymmetrical; for, if all
the bodies in motion which compose the solar system were placed
before a glass, the image in it could not be superimposed upon the
reality. . . . Terrestrial magnetism . . . the opposition between
positive and negative electricity, are but resultants of asymmetrical
actions and movements. . . . Life is dominated by asymmetrical
actions. I can even imagine that all living species are primordially
in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic
asymmetry. [25]

These intoxicating speculations caused Pasteur to embark on a series
of fantastic experiments, aiming at nothing less than the creation
of life by means of imitating the asymmetric action of nature in the
laboratory, using powerful magnets and all kinds of optical tricks. It
was this alchemist's dream which gave birth to the 'grand design' which
I have mentioned and which -- like a blue-print drawn in invisible
ink -- remained the secret inspiration behind his researches. Luckily,
circumstances compelled him to descend from the monumental to the trivial
level: Pasteur had to give up trying to create life and had to get 'up to
his neck in beet-juice'. He had been appointed Professor of Chemistry in
Lille; and no sooner was he installed than Monsieur Bigo, an industrialist
engaged in the production of alcohol from beet-sugar, came to consult
him about certain difficulties encountered in the process. Since this
was one of the main industries of the region, Pasteur embarked on the
task with patriotic fervour -- it was the first in the series of this
type of venture, long before the silkworms, the wine, and the beer.
In examining the fermented juice of the beet, he found in it a component,
amyl alcohol, which turned out to be optically active. Therefore its
molecules must be asymmetrical; but according to the grand design,
asymmetry is the privilege and secret of life; therefore fermentation
came from the activity of living things, of microbes. At this point the
chain reaction set in which fused the germ theory of fermentation to the
germ theory of disease. Thus did the alchemist's pipe-dream give birth
to modern medicine -- as Kepler's chimerical quest for the harmonies
led to modern astronomy.
Here, I believe, is the clue to the scientist's ultimate motivation --
the equivalent of the meeting of the tragic and the trivial planes in
the artist's mind. Peering through his microscope or polariscope, in a
never-ending series of dreary, technical, specialized investigations
of amyl acid, tartaric acid, butyric acid, Pasteur was attending on
one level to the business in hand -- the beets of Mr. Bigo; on another
he was scanning the secret of life 'through veils getting thinner and
thinner'. Thus did some early explorers nourish the secret, childish hope
to find at the North Pole a crater revealing the axis on which the earth
turns. So did the Phoenician seamen hope to find, beyond the pillars of
Hercules, the island of Atlantis.
When he was thirty and newly married, Pasteur, though almost penniless,
embarked on an expedition through Central Europe -- a treasure-hunt for an
elusive commodity dear to his heart: paratartaric acid, a chemical derived
from the deposit in the vats of fermented wine
(
p. 193
f). He returned and described this Odyssey
in an article in the Strasbourg newspaper
La Verité
,
ending with the epic words: 'Never was treasure sought, never adored
beauty pursued over hill and dale with greater ardour.'

 

 

The dream which turned the tartar-crystals into a symbol of the secret
of life proved immensely fertile. But since the actual experiments
of creating life had failed, Pasteur, in his later years, reversed his
opinions and embarked on another celebrated controversy to prove that the
alleged 'spontaneous generation' of micro-organisms (without progenitors,
out of fermenting or putrefying matter) was a legend. 'It is a striking
fact,' writes Dubos, 'perhaps worthy of the attention of psychoanalysts,
that Pasteur devoted much of his later life to demonstrating that nature
operates as if it were impossible to achieve what he -- Pasteur -- had
failed to do. . . . Just as he had failed in his attempts to create or
modify life, so he proved that others, who had claimed to be successful
where he had failed, had been merely the victims of illusion.' [26]

 

 

This may indeed have been a factor which contributed to his change
of attitude, but only a superficial one, like his childish boastings
and showmanship. The obsession with the secret of life had bitten
into deeper strata, where opposites cease to be opposites, the law
of contradiction no longer applies, and a plus and minus sign become
interchangeable. Among his unpublished writings there is a passage
written when he was approaching sixty: