The Faber Book of Science (22 page)

It was dinner time in the Pasteur house, and Louis was at it again. With his wife, daughters and sole son sitting in mortified silence around the table; with the usual dinner guest, Monsieur Loir, at the table with them; with the best tablecloth laid, the right plates out, the first course on, and the long-suffering maids in position at the side; with everyone set to begin the meal, the Professor began his hunt.

‘He minutely inspected the bread that was served to him’, Monsieur Loir wrote much later, in old age, ‘and placed on the tablecloth everything he found in it: small fragments of wool, of cockroaches, of flour worms … I tried to find in my own piece of bread from the same load the objects found by Pasteur, but could not discover anything. All the others ate the same bread without finding anything in it.’

Then Pasteur went to work on the glasses. He lifted them up, peered at them closely, and wiped down each one he was going to use, hoping to remove all the contaminating dirt, which again no one else could see. He kept his fingers clean for the wiping, by refusing to shake hands with strangers or even friends during the day. The family waited, the maids and guest waited too, for all were used to the great man’s obsession. ‘This search took place at almost every meal’, Loir continued, ‘and is perhaps the most extraordinary memory that I have of Pasteur.’

What ever was going on? Had Pasteur gone bonkers, nuts, off his rocker? At first it’s tempting to think so. If Mme Pasteur came home from the Galeries Lafayette and started tearing apart the family’s food in search of non-existent wool and cockroaches, so that when her children returned they found her on the floor, legs out, hat askew and surrounded by great mounds of food in the kitchen, we could imagine that they would consider seeking professional help. But when it was their father who embarrassed them with his hunt through the food they took it as normal. To some extent this was because he was the greatest scientist in France, and so had the prerogatives of the gifted. But I suspect even more important was that this pre-dinner hunting ritual matched almost exactly what Pasteur talked about when it was over and he finally looked up.

There are many accounts surviving of what personal conversation with Pasteur was like. In his loud voice, and with his sombre expression (there is only one known drawing, photo, engraving, or sculpture of Pasteur smiling), Pasteur would continually harp on two themes. The first of course was his laboratory work. During dinner at home he would recount with great satisfaction details of the mice he had eviscerated that day, or the purées of vaccinated spinal cord he had prepared, or whatever else he had done in his continuing, remorseless battle against the bacteria. Those bacteria were tiny infecting creatures that most people couldn’t see, but which were always there, ready to pounce, to enter us and take over and grow. The hunt inside the dinner bread was no aberration with them around.

After the account of the day’s laboratory work had run dry, Pasteur’s monotone would turn to his second topic: politics. It was the only interest he held as strongly as bacteria. Some of his views were shared with all Frenchmen of his time, such as his great hatred of Germany, especially after the invasion of 1870–1. It was so strong that he devoted months of free work to the perfecting of French beer, so loyal patriots wouldn’t have to drink that Boche muck again. Yet his main political view was not quite so universally shared. Pasteur was an extreme reactionary in politics. He ran (unsuccessfully) for the Senate on an extreme right-wing ticket, and in his letters recorded that the social high point of his life was a one-week visit with Louis Napoleon, at the Emperor’s Palace in Compiègne.

The reason was simple. Pasteur had a horror of democracy. There was ordered society, which was good, especially if led by a strong man,
and there was also a curious anti-society, a disordered thing of raw uncultivated bodies: the mob. That was a collection of small infecting creatures that decent people didn’t ordinarily see, but which was always there, ready to pounce, to enter our society and take over and grow. It was what Pasteur and most right-wing Frenchmen thought had created the French Revolution, surging into existence on the streets of Paris; it was what had produced the Terror against the aristocracy, and the uprisings of 1830, 1848, and then – what Pasteur called a
saturnale
– the brief workers’ takeover of the Commune in 1871.

Would someone coming late to the table know which of his two enemies Pasteur was going on about? The language of Pasteur and conservatives generally against the masses of the people was almost exactly like the language Pasteur had developed to use against bacteria. Both were everywhere, small swarming things ready to strike, to grow and propagate. They would destroy us in doing so, subvert our inner structure, have us collapse in disorder, and turn us into – the worst of all possible fates – a thing no different from the seething mass that had attacked. Let the mob take Paris and without the King or Emperor to shore us up we would dissolve into aimless bodies no different from the mob; let the bacterial mob take our physical body and we would decay into a putrefying bacterial mass no different from the attackers here either. If unpleasant entities such as the people or bacteria had to exist, then they must be kept firmly in their place. The people, and especially the workers, were safe only if kept in passive Catholic trade unions, or state-run clubs, or other trustworthy bureaucratic bounds. The bacteria, in all their unpleasant and quick-to-grow varieties, were safe only if restricted to one slot in the Great Chain of Being, that of the decomposer of dead bodies, destroying order only after all life in it had naturally gone, and returning its atoms to the soil for rebirth. Outside of that, though, and they were terrible.

Which came first? There is some evidence that for Pasteur it was fear of the mob. His ideas about bacteria appeared pretty much fully formed in his first writings (1857) on the process of fermentation. In trying to explain how grapes turned into wine, and similar processes, he predicted the existence of living microbes, all apparently identical, yet autonomous, and which competed among each other in an attempt to grow on their target medium until they had fully taken it over. It
turned out to be a good guess, but when he made it there was little evidence to back this or indeed any other detailed idea. Pasteur’s other descriptions of bacteria, again generally before there was clear evidence to demonstrate it, also matched the view that extreme conservatives took of society. One was that the infection had to be stopped early (think of putting people who even might be
revolutionaries
in prison); another was that apparently weak individual organisms could cause the demise of large, complex bodies, i.e., that outside bugs could cause inside infection.

To us such views are standard, but at the time medical tradition thought otherwise. We have to imagine the scientific world before the germ theory of disease. When bacteria were found in wounds or sick people it was really thought of as an unimportant by-product of the true disease, which came somehow mysteriously from within and had to run its course. This is why doctors were so upset when Pasteur and others suggested that by not washing their hands between touching diseased corpses and touching healthy or somewhat healthy patients, they might be spreading disease. To the doctors this was preposterous. How could minute organisms cause disease in creatures so much larger? All authorities brought up in the old tradition concurred. Queen Victoria’s medical advisors saw no need to clean up the no doubt typhoid-full cesspools near the water sources at Balmoral, from which she and the unfortunate Albert were encouraged to drink. Even Florence Nightingale never believed in ‘infection’, and was always against what in later life she called the ‘germ-fetish’.

It was mere common sense – but for Pasteur it was a common sense which he saw, he
felt,
must be mistaken. An investigator with the standard medical view in mind, let alone one with a brain swept clean of all pre-hypotheses, could never have developed the whole concept of infecting microbes from the small evidence with which Pasteur began. But someone disposed to push forth this idea of small swarming things always ready to destroy order and take over; someone primed to find it anywhere he looked: he would be the one more likely to come up with the germ theory of disease.

Such similarities between social and scientific views have long been common – what better place to get fresh ideas than to just look around you? – and were especially so in the nineteenth century, when so many fields were being set up for the first time. When German professors discovered the approach of several million sperm to the human egg,
which only one successfully penetrated, they described it as following the morally sound marriage patterns of the time. On one side there was a passive, waiting egg; on the other a crowd of rushing, eager sperm suitors, of which only the luckiest and strongest one would make it all the way into her affection – just as the professors might hope would happen to their own no doubt properly brought-up daughters.

From the pure evidence they had to work with this is almost all unjustified interpolation. The microscopes of the time could barely get any detail on the egg and its fine movements, and only produced a series of isolated, blurry images. From those static images one could just as well imagine the female with her egg being not passive but taking a more Boadicean approach to her men. This indeed is the standard view today: video microscope images and better
in
vivo
techniques show that the sperm don’t head towards the eggs, but rush around randomly in all directions; it’s the woman’s body that directs them in, sometimes helped by an actively slurping cervix. Once drawn closer the sperm are dragged over the final approach by chemical trails the egg sprays out to energize and pull in a particular one. But this for the proper professors, if not their eager-to-boogie daughters, is not what they would have liked to see.

Maxwell’s development of the kinetic theory of gases also seems to have come from his sharing in a standard view of society at the time. It was hard to tell what each individual in the great nation of England under Victoria was going to do, but somehow you could be sure that the end result of all those millions fussing, scurrying, slipping and interacting would be to man the navy, rule over the colonies, maintain a large coal industry, and do all those other things England was known for. This strangely cohesive power of the multitude, even though you could never tell what all the individuals in it were doing, was being described in detail by the new science of Social Statistics, and it was by explicit acknowledgement to it that Maxwell worked out his theory of gases where the scurrying molecules also were described only by overall statistics, and not individual biographies.

This sort of explanation sounds good, but it could become too deterministic. Should not every French conservative of the time who was aware of the problems of fermentation and disease have struck his head and said, ‘Quelle bêtise! Of course the problem must be due to multitudes of blindly swarming bacteria! What else would make sense
of my political phenomenology and analogical thinking?’ In the Hollywood version, some of the big words judiciously dropped, that’s no doubt how it would be. But as we know, such mass discovery did not occur: most French brows remained unslapped. Why Pasteur happened to be especially sensitive to this aspect of political society and worked it into his answers to the problem of disease, is a matter for the psychologist or biographer to answer. Our question now rather is: why did so many people at the time – so many of our own great-grandparents – go along with him? For the bacterial concept was not one of those scientific ideas, such as quantum mechanics, which ordinary people have a difficult time taking up. Rather it was like momentum, or computers: quickly accepted by all.

The first thing to note in an explanation is that, for humans, thinking by analogy is almost inescapable. Everything that works at one level we’re keen to try to see in another one. I remember as a kid, when first learning about the solar system model of the atom, immediately wondering if our solar system was an atom in a larger being. Perhaps the gentle reader remembers the same.

Even easier is to compare what we see with our actual physical body. That, after all, is what we have to spend our lives immersed in. Children who draw the windows of houses to look like eyes so that the whole family home becomes like a larger body are doing just this. It is a very old technique, and was given wide spread in our culture through the notion of the Body of Christ. For long centuries that body was not just an analogy to society, but in the
corpus
mysticum
was actually identified with the whole body of Christian society.

When we do compare the world to a body, we end up having to take into account that our own physical body is limited, both in prowess and, especially, in the fact that it will in time come to an end. Religion provides one consolation for this, but whenever men have strayed from religion there has been a need to find another consolation. Frequently this has meant finding something in the outside world to identify with that would provide that missing but so desired escape from mortality. In the late sixteenth century, legal and administrative documents began to note that the king had a natural body, which was certain to decay, but that the political body he was identified with was oh so very much better than that material one. Even in that early period those identifications with the Body Politic seem to be phrased wistfully, as if realizing it was only a second best.