`How Shall a Generation Know Its Story?'

My French friend, a computational mathematician, asked who I thought was the greatest American. I had too many answers and thus no answer: Lincoln? Walt Whitman? Henry James? Louis Armstrong? I don’t know, but probably I should be proud so many nominees come to mind. Without hesitation, Jean-David agreed with my first response, Lincoln. Why? I asked. “Because he freed the slaves,” he answered with certainty. I reminded him that Napoleon III and the French upper crust maintained cordial relations with the slave-owning Confederacy, making no formal denunciation or endorsement of either side. “The French are always careful,” he said, a response I’m still weighing.

In turn, I asked Jean-David to name the greatest of his countrymen. Again he replied without hesitation: “Louis Pasteur.” My kneejerk answer would have been Proust, with Montaigne a close second, but consider Pasteur: He confirmed the germ theory of disease, developed the first rabies vaccine and demonstrated the importance of the process we call pasteurization. He showed that diseases, including anthrax, cholera and smallpox, were caused by microorganisms and could be prevented by vaccination. In the last 150 years, Pasteur, who died in 1895, has saved tens of millions of lives. He transformed the world for the better, and I conceded to Jean-David he was right.

The late American poet Edgar Bowers agreed. In “For Louis Pasteur,” Bowers claimed to observe three birthdays each year: Mozart’s, Pasteur’s and Paul Valery’s. The poem begins:

“How shall a generation know its story
If it will know no other? When, among
The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur
Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,
Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard,
For all to see, the Streptococcus chain.
His mind was like Odysseus and Plato
Exploring a new cosmos in the old
As if he wrote a poem -- his enemy
Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground
His introspection.”