Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was a French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was named after him.
Chance favors only the prepared mind.
Pasteur didn’t say that as a motivational poster line. He said it as a working scientist while building a new faculty of science in Lille (1854) and immersing himself in the reality of industry problems like fermentation. He noticed that when beer or wine “went wrong,” it wasn’t bad luck; it was a process drifting out of control.
So he did what prepared minds do: he turned a messy situation into a testable system: observations, hypotheses, controlled experiments, and repeatable methods. That mindset helped drive breakthroughs that reshaped microbiology and public health.
Vaccination
Decades later, that same discipline showed up in one of his most famous high-stakes moments. In 1885, a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, was bitten repeatedly by a rabid dog.
A physician, Dr. Grancher, urged Pasteur to attempt an unproven treatment. Pasteur and his colleagues proceeded with a carefully prepared vaccination approach—and the boy survived.
Steal the lesson
Pasteur’s “luck” wasn’t random. It was the compound interest of preparation: the routines, the checks, the test plans, the willingness to define assumptions and to verify them before reality forced the issue.