Louis Pasteur

Pasteur came from nothing, a peasant's son in the French Jura who would upend medicine forever. This biography traces his relentless ascent through the laboratories of France, where stubborn experiments and sharper insight dismantled centuries of miasma theory and handed humanity its first real weapons against invisible killers. Watch him race to develop the rabies vaccine, watching his own colleagues inject themselves with untested serum to prove it worked. Keim captures the texture of a man who refused to quit: persecuted by rivals, dismissed by academies, yet certain that observation could unlock nature's secrets. The wine, silk, and dairy industries he saved are footnotes compared to the lives he transformed. This is the story of how one stubborn Frenchman taught the world to see the germs hiding in plain sight.