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60 free Louis Pasteur trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Louis Pasteur trivia quiz covers the chemist who never held a medical licence yet did more for medicine than almost any doctor. The easy questions handle pasteurisation, the swan-neck flask, the rabies vaccine and the 'prepared mind'. From there it moves through the life: the tanner father, the boy who preferred sketching, the mediocre chemistry grade, the mutton-stew revolt, the mirror-image crystals that were arguably his greatest discovery, and the silkworms of the Cevennes. The harder end covers the Alhumbert Prize, the flasks opened on mountain tops, the rival Pouchet, the chicken cholera that would not stay virulent, the sheep at Pouilly-le-Fort and what the notebooks later revealed about the vaccine, the boy Joseph Meister and the doctor who actually held the syringe, the earthworms in the cursed fields, the quarrel with Koch, and the Byzantine mosaics over his tomb. Every answer was checked against Pasteur's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01Pasteur was born in 1822 in the town of Dole, in which part of eastern France?
Jura
The family soon moved to Arbois, where he went to school and later kept a house.
Q 02What was the trade of Pasteur's father Jean-Joseph?
Tanner
The family was poor and Catholic; Louis was the third child.
Q 03As a boy Pasteur was an average student whose real interests were fishing and what?
Sketching
His pastel portraits of parents, friends and neighbours survive.
Q 04Pasteur is described as having had which learning difficulties?
Dyslexia and dysgraphia
He entered primary school in 1831 and was never thought particularly academic.
Q 05Pasteur passed his 1842 science baccalaureate at Dijon with a mediocre grade in which subject?
Chemistry
It did not stop him becoming one of the century's great chemists.
Q 06Which elite Paris school did Pasteur enter in 1843, on his second attempt at the entrance exam?
The Ecole Normale Superieure
He had passed the year before but withdrew because his ranking was low.
Q 07Pasteur's wife Marie Laurent was the daughter of the rector of which university, where he held a chair?
Strasbourg
They married in 1849 and she became his scientific assistant.
Q 08Three of Pasteur's five children died in childhood of which disease?
Typhoid
Jeanne died at nine, Cecile at twelve; a third child, Camille, died of a liver tumour at two.
Q 09Pasteur famously said that in the field of observation, chance favours only the what?
Prepared mind
He said it in 1854 on becoming dean of the new science faculty at Lille.
Q 10At Lille in 1854 Pasteur began the studies that made his name, on what?
Fermentation
A local manufacturer's trouble with souring beetroot alcohol got him started.
Q 11After the Ecole Normale 'bean revolt', which dish did Pasteur decree be served every Monday?
Mutton stew
His authoritarian reforms provoked two serious student revolts.
Q 12When Pasteur threatened to expel any student caught smoking, how many of the school's 80 resigned?
73
His reforms as director of studies raised standards but made him deeply unpopular.
Q 13Pasteur's early work on tartrate crystals was the first demonstration of what?
Molecular chirality
Some historians call it his most profound and original contribution to science.
Q 21Pasteur spent five years at Ales studying two silkworm diseases: pebrine and what?
Flacherie
He at first thought the two were the same disease, and only separated them in 1867.
Q 22Pebrine, the silkworm disease Pasteur fought, is now known to be caused by what?
A microsporidian
He first took the corpuscles for a symptom, then in 1870 recognised them as the cause.
Q 23Which chemist and senator asked Pasteur in 1865 to investigate the silkworm plague?
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
Pasteur had attended Dumas's lectures at the Sorbonne as a student.
Q 14Pasteur split tartrate crystals into two mirror-image forms. How did their solutions differ?
Rotate polarised light oppositely
One was dextrorotatory, the other levorotatory; the shape of the molecule was twisting the light.
Q 15Pasteur's yeast research began when a Lille manufacturer asked about souring alcohol made from what?
Beetroot
The manufacturer's son was one of his students.
Q 16Pasteur showed that sugar turning to alcohol was caused by what, not by chemical decomposition?
Living yeast
Berzelius and Liebig had argued for decomposition; Pasteur proved them wrong.
Q 17Pasteur showed that wine turned sour when a contaminating microorganism produced what?
Lactic acid
His 1857 memoir predicted a 'lactic yeast' present whenever sugar becomes lactic acid.
Q 18The 'Pasteur effect' describes yeast fermenting less sugar when exposed to what?
Air
He observed the lower aerobic rate in 1861.
Q 19Pasteur patented his heating process in 1865 to fight the 'diseases' of what?
Wine
Only later was pasteurisation applied to beer and milk.
Q 20Pasteur's ideas about keeping microbes out of the body inspired which surgeon's antiseptic methods?
Joseph Lister
Pasteur also urged doctors to sanitise their hands and instruments before operating.
Q 24Which Rouen museum director was Pasteur's chief opponent in the debate over spontaneous generation?
Felix Pouchet
Pouchet claimed air alone could generate life in liquids; the Academy offered a prize to settle it.
Q 25What distinctive shape of flask did Pasteur use to disprove spontaneous generation?
Swan-neck
Dust stuck in the curving neck; broth stayed sterile until the flask was tilted.
Q 26Pasteur opened flasks of boiled broth at different altitudes. Why did fewer grow organisms high up?
Less dust in the air
The organisms, he showed, came from outside on dust, not from the liquid or the air itself.
Q 27How many francs came with the Alhumbert Prize Pasteur won in 1862 for refuting spontaneous generation?
2,500
He declared the doctrine would never recover 'from the mortal blow of this simple experiment'.
Q 28After his 1868 stroke Pasteur relied on assistants for the chicken cholera work: Emile Roux and who else?
Charles Chamberland
Chamberland later secretly prepared the alternative vaccine used at Pouilly-le-Fort.
Q 29Which term did Pasteur introduce for the artificial weakening of a microbe's virulence?
Attenuation
Old chicken cholera cultures that failed to kill were the clue.
Q 30Pasteur believed his chicken cholera bacteria were weakened by contact with what?
Oxygen
Cultures kept in sealed containers, he said, never lost their virulence.