Originally published on the Predatory Leadership Blog on December 7, 2008 and re-produced here with the author's permission.

Lack of awareness of the global impact of predatory leaders today is akin to the lack of understanding of the causes of disease prior the research and discoveries of Pasteur, Lister and Koch. Until then, doctors knew nothing about bacteria, virus and other invisible agents; they had no idea that these microscopic agents existed or were the source of many of the deadliest diseases affecting humans.

Along the line of thinking that the high offices of government and corporate leadership harbor a major source of humanity’s problems, prior to Pasteur, hospitals and doctors themselves were great sources of disease. There were many theories about the causes of disease – primordial beliefs that illness was caused by any number of causes: supernatural forces, Greek & Roman explanations of the humours of the body, Egyptian theories about the channels of the body, spontaneous generation, and so on. The most effective descriptions and treatments of illness by doctors and researchers came from logical deductions based on observations and intuitive guesses. From ancient times through the 18th century, no significant progress was made in understanding and effectively responding to the causes of disease.

The most ordinary observation has at all times demonstrated that animal and vegetable substances, exposed after death to contact with atmospheric air, or buried in the earth, disappear, in consequence of various transformations.

Fermentation, putrefaction, and slow combustion, are the three phenomena which concur in the accomplishment of this great fact of the destruction of organic substances--a condition necessary for the maintenance of life on the earth ...

Dead substances that ferment or putrefy do not yield solely to forces of a purely physical or chemical nature. It will be necessary to banish from science the whole of that collection of preconceived opinions which consist in assuming that a certain class of organic substances--the nitrogenous plastic substances--may acquired, by the hypothetical influence of direct oxidation, an occult power, characterised by an internal agitation, communicable to organic substances supposed to have little stability ...

Originally published in “The Rotarian” magazine in June, 1937

A little more than a century ago—December 27, 1822—in, the humble dwelling of a tanner in Dôle, France, a child was born who was destined to create new sciences, to transform industries, and to bring the greatest relief to human miseries: Louis Pasteur.

Pasteur had just graduated from the Ecole Normale when he demonstrated the relation which existed between rotatory power and molecular dissymmetry. This work was the origin of that stereochemistry later associated with the names of Le Bel and Van’t hoff.

The man whose name is associated with the saving of lives from mad-dog bite, and with safeguarding the lives of babies through the pasteurization of milk and of other dairy products, was born and lived in France. Indomitable in courage, persistent, patient, he pursued his studies for the welfare of mankind despite the jibes of the scoffers and reactionaries of his time. The story of his life is an epic of service above self.