Where did Louis Pasteur grow up and live?

📍Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

1887 – 1895

“I was born in Dole in the Jura region of France in 1822, but it was Paris and the Institut Pasteur — the research institute I founded in 1887 — that became my true home, and where I spent the final years of my life living in a private apartment within the institute's building. The Institut Pasteur was everything I wanted to create: a place dedicated entirely to scientific research, independent of the university system, able to pursue whatever questions seemed most important. I had by then overturned the theory of spontaneous generation, established germ theory, developed vaccines for chicken cholera and anthrax, and created the treatment for rabies. My laboratory and my apartment were a few steps from each other and I moved between them at all hours — science was never separate from life for me, and the Institut Pasteur made that integration physically real.”

👍 LovedThe Institut Pasteur as both workplace and home — the integration of scientific life and daily life that the building allowed. The independence from bureaucratic university structures that the institute provided. The sense of having built something that would outlast me and continue the work.

👎 DislikedThe series of strokes that left me partially paralysed from 1868 onwards, requiring me to dictate rather than write. The attacks from colleagues who resisted germ theory. The exhausting public controversies that accompanied scientific revolution.

Map showing where Louis Pasteur lived — Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Louis Pasteur's home at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

📍 Street view today

Sources: Debré, P. Louis Pasteur (1994, translated Forster), Johns Hopkins University Press; Geison, G. The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995), Princeton University Press; Pasteur, L. Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine (1878)