Pasteur Institute

The Pasteur Institute is a nonprofit foundation for the study of biology, including microorganisms, vaccines, and disease, in Paris, France. It was established in 1887 and named after Louis Pasteur, the institute’s first director.

Pasteur was one of the most significant medical scientists in history and is now considered the father of microbiology. Motivated by the death of three of his children to typhoid, he turned from his early successes in chemistry to the study of what we now call microbiology. The “germ theory” of disease had only recently been proposed and had not yet been proven. Pasteur first demonstrated that fermentation and bacterial growth were the result of the growth of microorganisms and not the spontaneous generation of one substance from another. Although the pharmaceutical ...