Louis Pasteur

On July 6, 1885, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister was brought to Louis Pasteur's laboratory in Paris. He had been badly bitten by a rabid dog, and without treatment he would almost certainly die. Pasteur, who was not a physician, had been testing a rabies vaccine on dogs but never on a human. After consulting doctors, he went ahead. Meister survived, and the treatment made Pasteur one of the most famous scientists in the world.

He was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole, in eastern France, at two in the morning, as his birth record states. His chart has a remarkable concentration of planets in Capricorn: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune, all in the third house, which governs study, observation and the communication of ideas. Capricorn is methodical, patient and practical, the sign of slow, rigorous work that builds something lasting. Six planets in Capricorn in the house of learning describe a mind devoted to careful experiment and to results that could be applied, and Pasteur was the most practical of great scientists.

His father was a tanner and a veteran of Napoleon's armies, and the family moved to the town of Arbois. As a boy Pasteur was considered an average student who loved drawing and painting portraits. He was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he trained as a chemist.

His first great discovery came in 1848, when he showed that crystals of tartaric acid came in two mirror-image forms, laying a foundation for the study of molecular chirality. From there he moved to fermentation, proving that it was caused by living microorganisms rather than spontaneous chemical processes. That work led to germ theory and to a method of gently heating wine, and later milk, to kill spoilage microbes, the process now called pasteurization.

His Moon is in Gemini in the eighth house, which concerns death, disease and hidden forces. The eighth house was the territory of his life's work: the invisible organisms that cause decay and illness. It was also the house of terrible personal loss. Three of his five children died young, two of them from typhoid fever, and the grief drove his determination to understand infectious disease. In 1868, at forty-five, he suffered a stroke that left one side of his body partly paralyzed, and he kept working.

Saturn, retrograde in Taurus, falls in his seventh house of partners and opponents, and Pasteur was a fierce controversialist who fought long public battles with rivals, including the German scientist Robert Koch. In 1881 he staged a public demonstration of an anthrax vaccine on a farm at Pouilly-le-Fort, vaccinating some sheep and leaving others unprotected; the vaccinated animals survived.

He famously said that in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind. The Institut Pasteur opened in Paris in 1888, and he died on September 28, 1895. The six Capricorn planets in the house of study describe that prepared mind exactly.