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How did Louis Pasteur cleverly use oxygen to create an anthrax vaccine?
At the end of the 19th century, French chemist Louis Pasteur successfully developed the first effective anthrax vaccine. This achievement not only changed the history of vaccines, but also had a revolutionary impact on public health at the time. However, one of the most fascinating stories is how Pasteur used oxygen to make vaccines.
As early as the 1870s, Pasteur began to explore the development of a vaccine for anthrax using previous immunization methods against chicken cholera. His research attracted widespread attention, and a famous public experiment was conducted in Pouilly-le-Fort, France in 1881. The experiment involved two groups of 25 sheep, one goat and several cows. Pasteur gave one group of animals two injections of anthrax vaccine, and the second group was not vaccinated.
All unvaccinated animals died of anthrax, while animals in the vaccinated group survived.
This surprising result sparked an enthusiastic response from the public. Pasteur claimed that he made the anthrax vaccine by exposing the anthrax bacilli to oxygen. Information shows that the technology he used was actually derived from the method proposed by his competitor, French veterinarian Jean-Joseph-Henri Toussaint.
Pasteur's oxygen method was a pioneering attempt at an anthrax vaccine, although his scientific notes from the time present some ambiguity. Pasteur's vaccine-making process eventually produced an effective anthrax vaccine, but only after he patented his production process.
Pasteur's discovery had a profound impact on the development of vaccine science. His success was not only because he found a way to make a vaccine, but also because he pioneered the use of oxygen as a means to generate a weakened form of the pathogen, so that the vaccine could be infected without relying on the naturally functioning weakened form.
This process was not only an achievement in scientific experimentation, but also a giant step in the history of public health.
Over time, the development of anthrax vaccines has gone through several changes. The Austrian-South African immunologist Max Stern developed a live attenuated vaccine based on Pasteur's technology in 1935, which is still widely used today and provides protection for livestock industries around the world.
Subsequently, the anthrax vaccine developed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s began to be used medically in 1940. This vaccine showed considerable protective efficacy against cutaneous anthrax in clinical trials. By the 1950s, researchers in the United States and Britain also developed their own human anthrax vaccines. These vaccines met with varying levels of success and challenges.
The US anthrax vaccine was approved in 1970 and became the only human anthrax vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In the 1990s, due to BGI's participation in the U.S. biocontainment program, demand for its vaccine increased significantly, but controversy over its safety and effectiveness also ensued.
Amid the growing threat of bioterrorism, Pasteur's discoveries are still heavily emphasized today.
However, all this always raises a question: with the continuous advancement of new technologies and research, can our trust in vaccines still affect human confidence in fighting infectious diseases?
