The famous chemist and biologist Justus von Liebig dismissed the germ theory with a shrug of the shoulders, regarding Pasteur’s view that microbes could cause fermentation as ridiculous and naive as the opinion of a child “who would explain the rapidity of the Rhine current by attributing it to the violent movement of the many millwheels at Maintz.”

—René Dubos, Pasteur and Modern Science
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1988)