protestation, Louis Pasteur, and more...

So I opened my E-mail today to find that one of my fellow Fulbright grantees sent me (and everybody else in our group) an invitation to a protest to highlight the plight of discrimination against minorities. My very first invitation to a protestation Francaise, how exciting? Don't think I'll be attending this, however...not quite my cup o' tea. And it would be really nice if I could avoid witnessing any rioting and car fires during my year. Apparently we're getting closer and closer to riot season (usually end of Novemberish, when it starts to get cold and people don't feel like going to work).

The highlight of our orientation day today was a tour of the famed Institut Pasteur, which, incidentally, is only a few blocks away from my own place of work, the Hopital Necker-Enfants Malades. Basically, Louis Pasteur was Da Bomb, scientifically speaking. His early work in chemistry identified the existence of enantiometers (molecules can be either "right-handed" or "left-handed", a property which can be conferred from the diffraction of light in different patterns), and his later more famous work in medicine and microbiology led to the development of several major vaccines (rabies, anthrax), pasteurization, establishment of the germ theory of disease, and eventually the use of antiseptic technique during surgery and other medical procedures. Some of Pasteur's original flasks used to demonstrate sterile technique are actually on display in a small museum at the front of the institute, and the media in the bottom of the flask remains free of bacterial growth after over a century!