Louis Pasteur, molecular dissymmetry, therapeutic chemistry and neuropharmacology

Abstract

Louis Pasteur is celebrated as the founding father of microbiology. But he was a chemist by training and discovered molecular dissymmetry experimentally. All his life, his constant preoccupation will be to apply the method and strategies of the fundamental sciences to living processes, “from the molecule to the brain”. His fundamental aim will be, beyond the biology of microbes, the chemistry of life, a disposition which signs the originality of his work. More unexpectedly, Pasteur was at the origin of therapeutic chemistry—which his successors, and especially Daniel Bovet, brilliantly illustrated at the Pasteur Institute and which they would pursue with the pharmacology of the nervous system or “neuropharmacology”.

Keywords

• Louis Pasteur
• Molecular dissymmetry
• Medical chemistry
• Microbiology
• Neuropharmacology