French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, located in the Jura region of France. He grew up in the town of Arbois, and his father, Jean-Joseph Pasteur, was a tanner and a sergeant major decorated with the Legion of Honor during the Napoleonic Wars (A & E Television …show more content…
While working at Lille, he was asked to help solve problems related to alcohol production at a local distillery, and thus he began a series of studies on alcoholic fermentation. His work on these problems led to his involvement in tackling a variety of other practical and economic problems involving fermentation. His efforts proved successful in unraveling most of these problems, and new theoretical implications emerged from his work. Pasteur investigated a broad range of aspects of fermentation, including the production of compounds such as lactic acid that are responsible for the souring of milk. He also studied butyric acid …show more content…
That same year he presented experimental evidence for the participation of living organisms in all fermentative processes and showed that a specific organism was associated with each particular fermentation. This evidence gave rise to the germ theory of fermentation. (Ullman, 2016)
Ullman (2016) elucidated that Pasteur effect is the discovery that the fermentation process could be arrested by passing air (oxygen) through the fermenting fluid, which, according to Pasteur was due to the presence of a life-form that could function only in the absence of oxygen. This led to his introduction of the terms aerobic and anaerobic to designate organisms that live in the presence or absence of oxygen, respectively. He further proposed that the phenomena occurring during putrefaction were due to specific germs that function under anaerobic