section_path: Controversies
section_name: Controversies
paragraph_text: Controversies
  
  A French national hero at age 55, in 1878 Pasteur discreetly told his family to never reveal his laboratory notebooks to anyone. His family obeyed, and all his documents were held and inherited in secrecy. Finally, in 1964 Pasteur's grandson and last surviving male descendant, Pasteur Vallery-Radot, donated the papers to the French national library. Yet the papers were restricted for historical studies until the death of Vallery-Radot in 1971. The documents were given a catalogue number only in 1985.
  
  In 1995, the centennial of the death of Louis Pasteur, a historian of science Gerald L. Geison published an analysis of Pasteur's private notebooks in his The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, and declared that Pasteur had given several misleading accounts and played deceptions in his most important discoveries. Max Perutz published a defense of Pasteur in The New York Review of Books. Based on further examinations of Pasteur's documents, French immunologist Patrice Debré concluded in his book Louis Pasteur (1998) that, in spite of his genius, Pasteur had some faults. A book review states that Debré "sometimes finds him unfair, combative, arrogant, unattractive in attitude, inflexible and even dogmatic".