Louis Pasteur Quotes
There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.
Pasteur, Louis. "Pourquoi la France n'a pas trouvé d'hommes supérieurs au moment du péril." Revue Scientifique, vol. 8, 1871, p. 73.
The “gap” is different in different fields. Public health has a particularly large gap while laser app;ications have a much smaller one.
He was a friend of Sir Humphery Davy and other men of science. The word “science” was in common use, but there was no word for the person who practiced science. “Science Man” had been used but the English men of science were mostly of the upper class and appending “man” to a function was much too lower class for their taste. For example: “Coachman”, “Policeman”, “Iceman”, “Trashman”. So when Coleridge came up with “Scientist”, it received rapid approval and has been in use ever since.
While this is generally true, from the scientific point of view, it is not quite right. The layman and most engineers believe that scientists discover things that exist. Although they do most of the time, breakthrough’s of the last century have for example discovered new chemical elements, but there are a few that science has CREATED—they exist nowhere in nature. Scientists are beginning to develop new life forms as well as discovering already existing ones. For over a century now the science of metallurgy has created thousands of alloys that did not previously exist.
Although a conservative Republican, he and most other CEOs of modern companies do not denigrate and ignore science the way many other conservatives have done over the years.
This is why the American Government has played such a major role in most of the great technologies in American History. Interchangable Parts (A federal contract with Eli Whitney), Canal Construction (New York State built the Erie Canal), the Railroad (federal government gave hugh tracts of land to build the rail lines to the West), the Telegraph (No one would use it until the government financed the experiment to prove it by creating a line between Baltimore and Washington), AC Electricity, there the city of Rochester NY hired Tessler and Westinghouse to Demonstrate Generating Electricity at Niagra Falls and transmitting it over 20 miles which Edison’s Direct Current could not do), immunization (the Army Medical Corps gave the first grants to universities to develop the science of vaccines and immunization, the computer (in WWII the U. S. financed the development of computers sent to England to implement Turing’s breaking of the German “unbreakable” code), atiomic energy (the Manhattan Project—the largest scientific endeavor the world has known), the Internet (Developed with long term research funds for DARPA the future technology research arm of the Defense Department. American investors and businesspeople took each of these and developed them but the initial steps, when no capitalist dared risk on such basic and futureistic efforts were taken by American Government which probably could never have developed these technologies but the private sector could not do it with government in the role Moritz herein describes.
Louis Pasteur ForMemRS was a French biologist, microbiologist, and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of diseases, and his discoveries have saved many lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.
