Louis Pasteur

A French scientist whose demonstration that microbes cause disease refounded public health on the germ theory. His work on fermentation led to pasteurization, the heating of wine and later milk to destroy harmful microorganisms, which he patented in 1865. He then showed that disease could be prevented deliberately, developing the earliest laboratory vaccines against fowl cholera, anthrax and rabies from weakened microbes; his 1885 treatment of nine year old Joseph Meister made the boy the first human vaccinated against rabies. The Institut Pasteur, which officially opened in Paris in 1888 following a public appeal, institutionalized his program of vaccine research and remains a global public health institution.