the wiki on Pasteur has a couple of links to english translations:
http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cphl/history/articles/pasteur.htm
these are the same 3 papers listed as chapters in:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=O...oc&dq=Pasteur&sig=cnzUg6SgMOXLgtryeZpc6OG0ywQ
now if i read French, i'd have no problem:
As it happens I do read French. It will take me sometime to digest all of these, but when I checked through the index of Volume 2, there were several segments on spontaneous generation (so that book on fermentation may well be a good place to start). In particular there was a full report of Pasteur's presentation to the Sorbonne on April 7, 1864 on the impossibility of spontaneous generation.
Deamiter, sorry to say, you are also in error. While Pasteur did disprove the spontaneous generation of maggots in meat, his experiments went much further than that. In the introductory section of his presentation to the Sorbonne, he mentions that by 1864 virtually no scientist still believed in the spontaneous generation of rats, insects, maggots or worms. But a new frontier had appeared with the invention of the microscope.
He quotes a long section from
La Mer (The Ocean) by Michelet who contends that the spontaneous generation of microscopic life fills the gap between non-living matter and vegetative and animal life.
Pasteur's grand achievement in his own eyes, and the one he presented to the Sorbonne, was to show that Michelet was wrong, and that even microscopic life did not occur through spontaneous generation.
He first runs through an experiment by another scientist which apparently demonstrated spontaneous generation. He had used water purified by boiling it, used pure oxygen as the atmosphere in the container-to prevent any contamination that might exist in ordinary air, and introduced a filament of hay which had been baked at a fairly high temperature to kill any organisms on it. Yet he still got life forms growing on the hay despite all his precautions to introduce none.
Pasteur demonstrated that there was one thing he had not excluded. He had not taken into account the dust on the instrument he used to introduce the oxygen into the container. (Pasteur even demonstrated the omnipresence of dust by having the theatre darkened and a small beam of light shone through it in which air-born dust-particles could be seen. Sounds like he put on a good show.)
He then showed how he had repeated the experiment and done several variations on it in which he had used a goose-necked container with a dust trap in the neck so that particles in the incoming air did not come into contact with the water or other liquid he was using. These showed no evidence of spontaneous generation as long as they were protected from dust--even for years, yet microscopic growth showed up within days if dust particles were allowed to enter freely.
It is also clear that to Pasteur his demonstration that spontaneous generation did not occur, even in micro-organisms, was a blow against materialism.
Of course, there are still several differences between the theory of the spontaneous generation of life in the 19th century and current theories of abiogenesis. In the 19th century it was assumed not only that spontaneous generation was the primeval origin of life, but that it was still a contemporaneous process that could be observed. No one claims that abiogenesis as currently envisaged occurs today, since it requires substantially different atmospheric conditions.
Also in the 19th century it was assumed that the newly-discovered micro-organisms were the very simplest form of replicators. Modern theories see cells as too complex to be the earliest form of self-replicators and look to simpler forms of organic self-replicating molecules as precursors to cells.
So although Pasteur thought he had put
finis to the idea that life could arise naturally, he was not necessarily correct. He did however show that the simplest forms of life he and his contemporaries knew of did not arise through spontaneous generation.
It will take a while to attempt an actual translation of the article. Perhaps, rmwilliams can check the English-language version of the text on fermentation and see if it includes the report on the Sorbonne Conference on spontaneous generation. If so, we can all have it on line in a language we understand.
