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The Private Science of Louis Pasteur

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Laboratory Notebooks and the Private Science of Louis Pasteur

In 1878, when he was fifty-five years old and already a French national hero, Louis Pasteur told his family never to show anyone his private laboratory notebooks For most of a century those instructions were honored Pasteur's notebooks—like the rest of the manuscripts he left behind at his death in 1895—remained in the hands of his immediate family and descendants until 1964 In that year, Pasteur's grandson and last surviving direct male descendant, Dr Pasteur Vallery-Radot, donated the vast majority of the family's collection to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris But access to this material was generally restricted until Vallery-Radot's death in 1971, and there was no printed catalog of the collection until 1985

The Pasteur Collection at the Bibliotheque Nationale is stunning in its size and significance It is a tribute not only to Pasteur's own awesome productivity as scientist and correspondent, but also to the tireless efforts of Pasteur Vallery-Radot, who greatly increased the size of the initial family collection by gathering additional correspondence and manuscripts by and about his grandfather from every conceivable source There are, to be sure, other significant collections of manuscript materials by or relating to Pasteur—at the Academie des sciences and the Archives Nationales in Paris, for example, or at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States But the collection at the Bibhotheque Nationale is the largest and most important by far

As now deposited in the Salle de Manuscrits at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Papiers Pasteur includes fifteen large bound volumes of correspondence by, to, or about Pasteur Another fifteen volumes contain lecture notes, drafts of published or unpublished manuscripts, speeches, and related documents Most important, the Papiers Pasteur includes a meticulously preserved collection of more than 140 notebooks in Pasteur's own hand, of which more than one hundred are laboratory notebooks recording his day-to-day scientific activities over the full sweep of his forty years in research Until these manuscripts are deciphered, edited for publication, and subjected to critical scrutiny, our understanding of Pasteur and his work will remain incomplete There is no prospect that this monumental task will be accomplished anytime soon, not even with the stimulus of the centenary of Pasteur's death in 1995 Indeed, the task has not even begun in any systematic way, and a full and proper edition of Pasteur's papers and manuscripts will require a massive investment of time and resources

For the foreseeable future, we shall have to contend with a vast reservoir of unedited and unpublished manuscripts True, Pasteur Vallery-Radot long ago published a small but significant sample of the collection, including notably a four-volume selection of Pasteur's correspondence Some of these letters, when read critically in the light of other sources, already reveal a Pasteur who was more complex and interesting than he has been seen, or indeed wished to be seen Yet even these published letters have been surprisingly under-utilized by students of Pasteur's career They have done little to add nuance or depth to the standard Pastonan legend In the popular imagination, Pasteur remains the great and selfless "benefactor of humanity" who single-handedly slashed through the prejudices of his time to discover a set of scientific principles unmatched in their impact upon the daily lives and well-being of humankind

But as the centenary of Pasteur's death approached, his oft-examined career attracted still greater attention, some of it more critical than the usual celebratory accounts Much of the revaluation now underway has focused on Pasteur the man, whose human foibles and difficult personality have never been entirely absent from the published record but are now gaining wider publicity But Pasteur the scientist is also being subjected to the more systematic critical scrutiny that his importance and influence deserve That is not to suggest that Pasteur's life can be neatly divided into its scientific and nonscientific aspects In some ways, his scientific style seems a virtual extension of his personality, and one theme of this book will be that his scientific beliefs and modus operandi were sometimes profoundly shaped by his personal concerns, including his political, philosophical, and religious instincts

As this book unfolds, it will become clear how much the standard Pastorian legend needs to be qualified, even transformed That point will be made most explicitly in the last chapter, "The Myth of Pasteur," which will also serve as a bibliographical essay of sorts Long before that last chapter, however, the standard Pastonan saga will begin to unravel For now, I want only to emphasize that the most important revelations in this book are the result of focusing on what I have chosen to call "the private science of Louis Pasteur"

PRIVATE SCIENCE AND LOUIS PASTEUR

The choice of this phrase for the very title of this book deserves a preliminary discussion and justification, if only because some readers may consider it a contradiction in terms If, as many assume, the very definition of science implies a public (usually published) product—if, as Charles Gilhspie has written, "science is nothing until reported," or if, in Gerard Piel's words, "without publication, science is dead"—whatever can "private science" mean?

The notion of private science is indeed problematic, and not only in the sense that these commentators probably have in mind Strictly speaking, there may be no such thing as purely private science or knowledge—or even a purely private thought Even the most solitary scientist is heir to a tradition of thought, practices, techniques, training, and social experiences Perhaps this was part of what the Victorian physicist John Tyndall had in mind when he wrote in 1885, in his introduction to the English translation of the first biography of Pasteur, that "[t]he days when angels whispered into the hearkening human ear, secrets which had no root in man's previous knowledge or experience, are gone for ever" Tyndall's immediate purpose was to convey his inductivist skepticism toward the alleged role of "preconceived ideas" in Pasteur's research, but his general point can be extended to the realm of seemingly private thoughts or practices of any sort

For, in fact, there is always a continuum between private thought or practices and public knowledge, whatever the field The thoughts of the individual scientist alone in his or her study or laboratory will perforce be filtered not only through an inherited tradition, but also through the scientist's anticipations of audience response to the communication of those ideas The scientist will always be aware that the anticipated audience may be large or small, friendly and receptive, or skeptical or hostile According to the Russian cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1978), thought itself is nothing but "'inner speech,' or social conversations we have learned to perform in our heads" On this view, "when we think, we organize possible 'dialogues' with other people, whose voices and implicit social values live within us" One might even say that something like a "sociology of the mind" is always at work As we shall see in the case of Pasteur, and as the famous example of Darwin amply reveals, this sociology of the mind can temper, modify, repress, or forever silence a "passing thought"

Similarly, the "private" correspondence of a scientist (or anyone else) is obviously written with at least one recipient in mind In the case of famous correspondents, including the mature Pasteur, some presumably private letters are clearly also being addressed to that larger audience known as "posterity" More generally, as Stephen Jay Gould has suggested, there is little reason to suppose that "private letters somehow reveal the 'real' person underneath his public veneer" This common notion, says Gould, is a "misplaced, romantic Platonism"

People have no hidden inner essence that is more real than their overt selves If [a scientist] reacted one way to most people in public life, and another to his sister in letters, then the public man is most of the whole We meet a different [scientist] in these letters, not the truer core of an essential personality These letters do not show us the real man They simply remind us once again that people have the damnedest ability to compartmentalize their lives, one can be a fine statesman and a cad at home, a financial genius and an insensitive lout, a lover of dogs and a murderer of people

Gould's point can be extended to private documents of any sort, including even laboratory notebooks They may provide revealing insights into a scientist and his or her work, but they do not offer uniquely privileged access to the "real" story as opposed to the public "myth" In the case at hand, Pasteur's public performances must also be incorporated into our understanding of him and his science, as with any other social actors and their work

"Private science" becomes a still more problematic category when the research involves assistants and collaborators, as it did throughout much of Pasteur's career (and as it does in most modern laboratory research) Even Pasteur, despite his secrecy and "Olympian silence" about the direction of his research, could not always conceal his work or thoughts from his closest collaborators And a few of them did not always and forever honor Pasteur's stricture that the research carried out in his laboratory should remain a totally private affair within the Pastorian circle unless and until he chose to disclose the results himself or specifically authorized others to do so True, Pasteur's collaborators did honor this demand to a degree that may seem astonishing in our less discreet world, and nearly all of them continued to do so even after the master's death But there is evidence to suggest that these severe restrictions on public disclosure did not always sit well with some of Pasteur's assistants and co-workers By 1880, for example, Emile Roux, his major collaborator in research on anthrax, rabies, and other diseases, was warning Pasteur that outsiders had begun to regard his laboratory at the Ecole Normale as a "mysterious sanctuary" Eventually, the veil of secrecy was pulled back in part, most notably in the anecdotal reminiscences of Pasteur's own nephew and sometime personal research assistant, Adrien Loir, who did, however, wait half a century to publish his revelations in a widely ignored series of essays that earned the apt title, "In the Shadow of Pasteur"

One could raise still other objections to the whole notion of "private science," but I will proceed as if the term embodies a meaningful distinction Throughout this book, I will use the term "private science" in the informal sense of those scientific activities, techniques, practices, and thoughts that take place more or less "behind the scenes" That definition might be less appropriate in the case of a scientist whose activities and career were less theatrical than Pasteur's, but his carefully orchestrated public performances invite a close examination of the private dress rehearsals Finally, I should stress that my notion of "behind the scenes" is not restricted to activities and thoughts that were literally kept out of public view, but will occasionally be extended to matters that can be found in the published record if one looks hard enough, but have been lost from that collective public memory represented by the standard Pastorian legend

This approach means, among other things, that I will sometimes highlight relatively obscure features of Pasteur's published papers or correspondence, and will pay much closer attention than usual to some of the supporting cast, including a few of the once public but now mostly forgotten critics of the star Nonetheless, the most striking revelations come when one brings to center stage some of the activities and ideas recorded only in Pasteur's unpublished manuscripts This book makes selective use of the full range of the manuscript materials that Pasteur left behind In the most dramatic cases, however—including Pasteur's crowning work on vaccines against anthrax and rabies—the crucial evidence will come from his laboratory notebooks It is therefore worth saying something now about my attitude toward these very special documents

PASTEUR AND HIS LABORATORY NOTEBOOKS

The most private of the manuscript materials Pasteur left behind are the 144 holographic notebooks that his grandson donated to the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1964 Of these 144 notebooks, 42 fall outside the category of laboratory notebooks, consisting instead of collections of newspaper clippings, draft sketches of projected books that never appeared, lecture outlines, and reading and lecture notes The remaining 102 notebooks represent the most precious documents in the Papiers Pasteur They consist of careful and detailed records of experiments carried out by Pasteur and his collaborators during forty years of active, almost daily research They are the central repository for the private science of Louis Pasteur, the documents he once asked his family to keep forever out of public view During his lifetime, he carefully guarded them from others, including his closest collaborators Even when he left Paris for trips or holidays, Pasteur took the most current of the laboratory notebooks with him His co-workers sometimes experienced inconvenience or worse because of his insistence on total control of the notebooks

In late November 1886, for example, while Pasteur was resting at a villa on the Italian Riviera for the sake of his fading health, his collaborators in Pans were suddenly faced with a legal problem connected with the death of a boy who had undergone the Pastorian rabies treatment (a story to which we shall return in Chapter Nine) As we know from his retrospective personal testimony, Pasteur's nephew-assistant Adrien Loir had to be dispatched quickly to Italy in order to retrieve important details about the boy's treatment—information that was recorded only in a laboratory notebook the master had taken with him to the Italian villa Earlier, in July 1883, when Emile Roux wanted to gather together some of the results of his important work on rabies for his doctoral thesis, he had to seek Pasteur's permission to use information recorded in the laboratory notebooks To ensure the master's assent, Roux promised to expose only those results already made known in a general way in Pasteur's published papers, submitted a draft version to the master for his corrections and revisions, and "inscribed your [i e, Pasteur's] name on the first page of this exposition of studies that belong to you"

In 1896, a year after Pasteur's death, Roux gave a revealing, if surprisingly restrained, account of the master's proprietary attitude toward his laboratory notebooks Roux's account also deserves attention because it reveals the extent to which the work in Pasteur's laboratory had become a collaborative affair by the time Roux participated in it

In order to be nearer the work, master and disciples lived in l'Ecole Normale Pasteur was always the first to arrive, every morning, at 8 o'clock, I heard his hasty step over the loose pavement in front of the room which I occupied at the extremity of the laboratory As soon as he had entered, a bit of paper and pencil in his hand, he went to the thermostat to take note of the state of the [microbial] cultures and descended to the basement to see the experimental animals Then we made autopsies, cultures and the microscopic examinations Then Pasteur wrote out what had just been observed He left to no one the care of keeping the experimental records, he set down most of the data which we gave him in all its details How many pages he has thus covered, with his little irregular, close-pressed handwriting, with drawings on the margin and references, all mixed up, difficult to read for those not accustomed to it, but kept nevertheless with extreme care Nothing was set down which had not been established, once things were written, they became for Pasteur incontestable verities When in our discussions, this argument resounded, "It is in the record book,' none of us dared to reply The notes being taken, we agreed upon the experiments to be made, Pasteur stood at his desk ready to write what should be decided upon

Then we spent the afternoon in making the experiments agreed upon Pasteur returned toward five o'clock He informed himself immediately of all that had been done and took notes, his notebook in hand, he went to verify the tickets fastened on the cages, then he told us of the interesting communications heard at the [Academie des sciences earlier in the afternoon] and talked of the experiments in progress

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Excerpted from The Private Science of Louis Pasteur by Gerald L. Geison. Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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