Carl Zimmer

And then he went to different places.

He went to farm fields, he went to mountains.

And the most amazing trip he took, it was actually to the top of a glacier.

which was very difficult, especially for someone like Pasteur, who you get the impression he just hated leaving the lab.

This was not a rugged outdoorsman at all.

But there he is, climbing around on the ice with this flask, raising it over his head, and he caught bacteria there as well.

And that actually was pivotal to destroying...

Spontaneous generation is a theory.

So aerobiology, among many, many other things, destroyed this idea that life could spontaneously burst into existence.

Not quite.

So he had these ideas about what it would take to actually show that some particular pathogen, a germ, actually caused a disease.

And that involved isolating it from patients, culturing it outside of them, and then actually

experimentally infecting an animal and showing the symptoms again.

And he did that with things like anthrax and tuberculosis.

He nailed that.

But then when it came to cholera, there was a huge outbreak in Egypt, and people were still battling over what caused cholera.

Was it miasma?

Was it corruption in the air?

Or was it, as Koch and others believe, some type of bacteria?

And he found a particular kind of bacteria in the stool of people who were dying or dead of cholera.