Word: pasteurization
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...empirical method of protecting man against one dread disease now known to be caused by a virus: infection with cowpox ("vaccinia," hence the general term vaccination) would ward off later infection with the deadly and disfiguring smallpox (so called to distinguish it from syphilis, "the great pox"). Louis Pasteur achieved a similar triumph of empiricism. Unable to isolate the microbe of rabies, he simply assumed that it was too small to be seen and developed the Pasteur treatment for victims of bites by rabid animals...
Most of the bacteria studied by Pasteur and his early followers were big enough to be trapped in fine porcelain filters, devised by Pasteur's assistant Charles Chamberland, and to be seen under the 19th century light microscope. It was a temperamental Dutch botanist, Martinus Beijerinck (1851-1931), who found that whatever caused mosaic disease in tobacco plants could slip through the minute pores of these filters. In 1897 he concluded that this infectious, filter-passing fluid was a "filterable virus." The word virus had been loosely used for centuries to denote any "poison" that caused infectious disease...
When Louis Pasteur found that some germs are always present in the healthiest animals and men, he concluded that no animal or man could live without them...
...human cancers, as many medical researchers suspect, why is it that nobody can find the guilty particles in cancer cells? To this baffling question a brilliant French investigator offered an answer last week, and said he had found substantial proof for it. Dr. Joseph Huppert. 41, of the Institut Pasteur, gave his report to Manhattan's SIoan-Kettering Institute...
Ever since Pasteur made his epochal discovery that inactive virus could give protection against rabies, thousands of bite victims each year have started the course of 14 shots. Many have quit because of severe and painful allergic reactions. Worse, the injections carried the danger of fatal encephalitis or paralysis, because they contained material from rabbit brains. Last week researchers in New York City's Department of Health reported that a modified vaccine made by growing the virus in fertilized duck eggs gives quicker protection, is safer and causes few unpleasant reactions...