`Sacred Passion, Practice and Metaphysic All the Same'

I spoke with a chemical engineering professor working on ways to manufacture electrical transmission lines from carbon nanotubes. Nature at the nano-scale behaves in bafflingly counter-intuitive ways. Carbon nanotubes of a certain configuration conduct electricity millions of times more effectively than copper – an unimaginable idea. Determining if such super-conductivity works on the mundane macro-scale is the focus of the professor’s research, which calls for painstaking experimentation.

I remembered the mythology surrounding Thomas Edison’s efforts to find the ideal substance for the filament in incandescent lights. Supposedly he tried thousands, from platinum to carbonized bamboo and human hair, before settling on tungsten. The professor, an Italian, didn’t share my fund of American folklore.

“More like Pasteur,” he said, and he was not merely being Eurocentric. Pasteur is a hero of science. He confirmed the germ theory of disease, inspiring Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic surgical techniques. Pasteur’s work with chickens and anthrax led to immunization and pasteurization. I first learned about Pasteur from the 1935 movie with Paul Muni, and about Edison from the movies starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. The finest tribute I know to the great bacteriologist is Edgar Bowers’ “For Louis Pasteur.” Read the whole thing here, please, but I’ll give the concluding stanza:

“I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium
Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence
Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,
Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,
Teaching his daughter to use a microscope
And musing through a wonder--sacred passion,
Practice and metaphysic all the same.
And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,
Humbling his pride by trying to write well,
Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention
Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,
And him whose mark I witness as a trust.
Others he saves but could not save himself –
Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates -- the spirit
Fastened by love upon the human cross.”

Bowers’ friend, the English poet Clive Wilmer, wrote his obituary for the Guardian after Bowers’ death on Feb. 4, 2000. Wilmer elegantly glosses Pasteur’s importance for Bowers:

“The title poem of his 1990 collection, For Louis Pasteur, announces his key loyalties. He confessed to celebrating every year the birthdays of three heroes: Pasteur, Mozart and Paul Valéry, all of whom suggest admiration for the life of the mind lived at its highest pitch -- a concern for science and its social uses, and a love of art that is elegant, cerebral and orderly.”

Gerald L. Geison, on the final page of The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995), explicitly links Edison and Pasteur:

“As in the case of Edison, whose legend has gone through several transformations in keeping with wider cultural and economic changes in American culture, so too will each age get the Pasteur it deserves.”

I’ve only browsed through Geison’s book, around which hangs a whiff of deconstructionism (read: hip irreverence and iconoclasm), but to his credit he does quote two stanzas of Bowers’ poem.