9781422277652

Chapter A Great Disease Fighter 1 There are few men and women in history who are universally acknowledged to have been truly and completely great. There must have been flaws in their character somewhere, but they are hidden by the immense good produced by their life and work. These people are noted not only for their tremendous achievements, but also for their beauty of character. Leonardo da Vinci was such a person. Louis Pasteur was another. In these cynical days, we are apt to regard with suspicion any claim to perfection. But this can be taken too far. It is rightly a source of inspiration to ordinary people like ourselves that such great men and women have existed, and their examples can help us in our daily lives. In the case of Leonardo, all who knew him testified to his delightful and generous character. Similarly with Louis Pasteur. Pasteur lived in a terrible age in France—an age of revolution and civil war, of grinding poverty, of needless slaughter. It was an age of corruption at every social level, of cowardice, deceit and faithlessness. It was the age when two of the greatest French novelists, Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, exposed the lust and greed of their society. It was certainly not an age that was likely to encourage or even recognize human perfection without a sneering suggestion that an appearance of goodness was merely a façade. Nevertheless it is most remarkable that no one has ever suggested that Pasteur was anything but a person of the utmost honor, integrity, and kindness, as well as having been intellectually one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.

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