Louis Pasteur
From RationalWiki
Louis Pasteur was one of the great Freedom French scientists, famous for his work with curing rabies and developing the idea of vaccination. He also championed the radical idea that dirty hands, clothes and instruments in hospitals contributed to the spread of disease, and basically demonstrated the germ theory of disease to be correct, although not in every case.
He is beloved of creationists because he disproved spontaneous generation. [1] They completely ignore, as is their forte, the fact that their idea of spontaneous generation and the idea that Pasteur disproved are vastly different things. He disproved the idea that maggots are spontaneously generated by some action of rotting meat. Creationists think(tm) that he disproved the idea of a non-supernatural abiogenesis event.
Pasteurisation, the process of heating/cooling food to kill germs, was also an idea that began with Pasteur, and in much of the food industry (particularly the dairy industry) it is considered one of the most important front-line sanitation procedures. (It is not so popular with certain food faddists, who believe that pasteurization destroys the nutrition of milk. Such is it ever with those with short memories of harder times.)
All in all he was about as practical a scientist as one could possibly be, a brilliant man to whom millions of people owe their lives and one who it can truly be said made a difference in the lot of nearly all people alive today.
That said, there are still those who consider vaccination and pasteurisation to be the work of the devil (or at least a big agribusiness conspiracy), although these processes have saved countless lives over the years.[2] Vaccine denialism and germ theory denialism still flourish today in spite of mountains of scientific evidence as to their efficacy.
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- ↑ See this Answers Research Journal article, for example. http://www.answersingenesis.org/contents/379/Louis-Pasteur.pdf
- ↑ Pasteurization of milk has all but eliminated milk-borne tuberculosis, diphtheria, salmonellosis, strep throat, scarlet fever, listeriosis, brucellosis and typhoid fever.
