Astral Codex Ten

Pasteur

3 min read

Pasteur

Article

Pasteur is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 28, 2022 and July 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a god-like figure”; “where prions were in Pasteur’s flask”. It most often appears alongside Britain, 1980s, 1989.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 28, 2022
  • Last seen: July 12, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

From Nostradamus To Fukuyama
September 28, 2022 · Original source
The lost thing is discovered, hidden for many centuries. Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a god-like figure. This is when the moon completes her great cycle, but by other rumours he shall be dishonoured
This seems to name Pasteur, who was indeed a celebrated discoverer of things. And Nostradamus scholars note that a historian accused Pasteur of plagiarism in 1995, which is a kind of dishonorable rumor. But the work here is being done by the translator: Pasteur is just French for “pastor”, and an honest translation would have just said “the pastor will be celebrated…”, which is in tune with all his other vague allusions to things happening.
Inline links: a historian accused Pasteur of plagiarism in 1995
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
July 12, 2024 · Original source
In 1862, Louis Pasteur boiled broth to kill the microscopic life in it, put some of the liquid in a goose-necked flask, and showed that if nothing living ever reached the liquid, no life would ever grow there. The experiment had enormous practical impact; it gave doctors the knowledge they still use to save lives by showing that because infections were living, reproducing things, if you could keep an environment sterile, you could keep a patient healthy. Had infectious prions been in Pasteur’s flask, curative medicine would never have gotten started. Doctors would still be competing with shamans and medicasters.
So goes the Land of Hypotheses. But we don’t live there, not in this life. In this life, we have a thousand unanswered questions. We can’t – yet – simulate all the universes where the prion question went different ways, where Alzheimer’s was a research focus in the 1950s, where we didn’t spend decades chasing the M/M homozygosity illusion, where the first Fore cannibalism victim died of something else, where prions were in Pasteur’s flask. But we can think, and dwell, and dream, and chase possibilities. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is a great book, precisely because it inspires possibilities. Even the ways it’s become wrong with time are usefully wrong – illustrative, if you will.