Louis Pasteur: The Father of Microbiology

A biography of the nineteenth-century French scientist whose insatiable thirst for discovery not only saved the French silk and wine industries from ruin-and in the latter case, gave us pasteurization-but who also developed the first successful vaccine against rabies, a scourge of nineteenth-century life. But even more, Pasteur's study of microorganisms gave rise to the field of microbiology and provided a framework on which future scientists were able to build, resulting in "wonder drugs" like the polio vaccine.