Pasteur Institute


The Pasteur Institute is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax and rabies. The institute was founded on 4 June 1887 and inaugurated on 14 November 1888.
For over a century, the Institut Pasteur has researched infectious diseases. This worldwide biomedical research organization based in Paris was the first to isolate HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 1983. It has also been responsible for discoveries that have enabled medical science to control diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, influenza, yellow fever, and plague.
Since 1908, ten Institut Pasteur scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology—the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared between two Pasteur scientists.

History

The Institut Pasteur was founded in 1887 by the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur. He was committed both to basic research and its practical applications. From the start, Pasteur brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by two normaliens, Émile Duclaux and Charles Chamberland, a biologist, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher and Emile Roux. One year after the inauguration of the Institut Pasteur, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, Cours de Microbie Technique.
Pasteur's successors have sustained this tradition, which is reflected in the Institut Pasteur's unique history of accomplishment:
A new age of preventive medicine in France was made possible by the Institut Pasteur's development of vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever and poliomyelitis. The discovery and use of sulfonamides in treating infections was another of its earlier breakthroughs. Some researchers discovered antitoxins, while Daniel Bovet received the 1957 Nobel Prize for his discoveries on synthetic anti-histamines and curarizing compounds.
Since World War II, Pasteur researchers have focused on molecular biology. Their achievements were recognized in 1965, when the Nobel Prize was shared by François Jacob, Jacques Monod and André Lwoff for their work on the regulation of viruses. In 1985, the first human vaccine obtained by genetic engineering from animal cells, the vaccine against hepatitis B, was developed by Pierre Tiollais and collaborators.

Opening

The center against rabies, directed by Jacques-Joseph Grancher and Émile Roux, had become so overcrowded that it became necessary to build a structure that Pasteur had been using the name "Institute Pasteur" long before it was even built. Pasteur delegated the task of the project and of creating the new building, situated on rue Dutot, to two of his colleagues, Grancher and Emile Duclaux.
From the beginning, the Institute experienced economic difficulties for which it needed the help of the government, some foreign rulers, and Madame Boucicaut, but this aid did not affect its independence.
The statutes drawn by Pasteur and later approved by Duclaux and Grancher define, besides its absolute freedom and independence, the institute's internal structure: a rabies division controlled by Grancher, anthrax one in Chamberland's hands, who also supervised the department of microbiology, while Emile Roux dealt with microbial methods applied to medicine.

World War I and II

During the First World War, the Pasteur Institute prioritized vaccinating troops against the easily contractable typhoid fever. By September 1914, the institute was able to provide 670,000 doses of the vaccine and continued to produce it throughout the conflict.
Gabriel Bertrand, with Roux's authorization, crafted a grenade based on chloropicrin and Fourneau discovered the chemical reaction that led to the formation of methylarsine chloride.
In 1921, Albert Simard edited the La réaction de fixation de l'alexine: son application au diagnostic sérologique de la peste, "work of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, plague laboratory."
In 1938, the institute, despite its relative poverty, built a biochemical division and another one dedicated to cellular pathology, whose direction was entrusted to the hands of Boivin. During the same period, Andre Lwoff assumed the direction of a new microbial physiology branch built on rue Dutot. The general mobilization after France's declaration of war against Germany, in September 1939, emptied the Institute and significantly reduced its activities, as members of appropriate age and condition were recruited into the army, but the almost total absence of battles during the first months of the conflict helped maintain the sanitary situation on the front. After the occupation of France, the Germans never tried to gather information from the institute's research; their confidence in Germany's advantage in this field decreased their curiosity, and their only interest was in the serums and vaccines that it could provide to their troops or the European auxiliaries they recruited. This relative freedom allowed the institute to become, during the two years after the occupation, a pharmacy for the Resistance thanks to the initiative of Vallery-Radot, Pasteur's nephew. The Germans became suspicious of the institute's staff only after an outbreak of typhoid in a Wehrmacht division that was stationed near Paris before being sent to the Russian front. The cause of the epidemic was later found to be due to a member of the Institute stealing a culture of the germ responsible for the disease and, with the collaboration of an accomplice, infecting a large quantity of butter used to feed German troops. The fact that the epidemic spread after the Germans sold some of the butter to civilians was proof that the outbreak was not caused by local water quality. Afterward, the German authorities ordered that the institute's stores containing microbial cultures could be opened only by authorized members; similar security problems also induced them to demand complete lists of the staff's names and functions; missing names caused the Germans to send two biologists, Dr. Wolmann and his wife, as well as other three lab assistants, to a concentration camp. The institute was not a location for German entrenchment even during the battles for Paris's liberation because of the honor and respect it commanded, as well as out of fear that involving it in any type of conflict might "free the ghosts of long defeated diseases".

Economical difficulties during the 1970s

At the end of 1973, the institute's economic status was so worrisome that its troubles aroused the public's interest: no one could believe that an institution that was to provide vaccines and serums for more than fifty million people could be undergoing such big financial problems, an institution that furthermore was believed to be under government protection and therefore shielded from bankruptcy. The causes of the decadence that brought the institute to financial ruin were numerous, but most of them were associated with its commercial and industrial activities and its management. This affected both the research and production branch: the research branch didn't receive enough funds and the production branch, which was losing market ground to the new private labs, was immobilized by the antiquated mechanical equipment.
In 1968, rabies reappeared in France after being previously eradicated in 1924. Despite the fact that it owed its original celebrity to the discovery of the rabies vaccine, the Pasteur Institute was ultimately replaced by other pharmaceutical industries in the production of vaccines. Despite the Pasteur Institute's financial troubles, its members were able to produce over 400,000 doses of vaccine against the Hong Kong influenza later that year.
In 1971, Jacques Monod announced a new era of modernization and development: this was symbolized by the construction of a new factory where all the production departments were to be reunited. Its construction cost forty-five million francs, and the Government granted the institute a sum of twenty million francs to bridge the deficit, followed by the people's initiative to also accept a role in the division of the financial responsibilities.