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LOUIS PASTEUR SUPPRESSED EXPERIMENTS THAT DIDN’T SUPPORT HIS THEORIES
One of the greatest scientific duels in history occurred between those who believed that microorganisms spontaneously generate in decaying organic matter and those who believed that the tiny creatures migrated there from the open air. From the late 1850s to the late 1870s, the eminent French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was locked in a death-match with opponents of spontaneous generation, especially Felix Pouchet. The two camps performed experiments one after f the other, both to prove their pet theory and to prove the opponent’s. As we know, Pasteur won the debate: The fact that microbes travel through the air is now accepted as a given, with s spontaneous generation relegated to the slagheap of quaint, discarded scientific ideas. But Pasteur didn’t win fair and square.
![Louis Pasteur]( "Louis Pasteur")
- Louis Pasteur (Photo credit: Sanofi Pasteur)
It turns out that some of Pasteur’s experiments gave strong support to the notion that rotting organic matter produces life. Of course, years later those experiments were realized have been flawed, but at the time they buttressed the position of Pasteur’s enemies. So he kept them secret.
In his myth-busting book Einstein’s Luck, medical and scientific historian John Waller writes: “In fact, throughout his feud with Pouchet, Pasteur described in his notebooks as ‘successful’ any experiment that seemed to disprove spontaneous generation and ‘unsuccessful’ any that violated
his own private beliefs and experimental expectations.”
When Pasteur’s rivals performed experiments that supported their theory, Pasteur would not publicly replicate those studies. In one case, he simply refused to perform the experiment or even discuss it. In another, he hemmed and hawed so long that his rival gave up in exas-peration.
Waller notes: “Revealingly, although Pasteur publicly ascribed Bastian’s results to sloppy methodology, in private he and his team took them rather more seriously. As Gerald Geison‘s study of Pasteur’s notebooks has recently revealed, Pasteur’s team spent several weeks secretly testing Bastian’s findings and refining their own ideas on the distribution of germs in the
environment.”
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