In the past weeks, the international media have reported explosions in central Tehran, including in the politically sensitive Pasteur Street area, home to key state institutions. But there is a deeper irony here: Pasteur Street, where the Iranian supreme leader was traced and killed, is not only about political power. It is also about microbes. Close by is the Pasteur Institute of Iran, which itself was hit on Thursday, April 2, rendering it “unable to continue delivering health services,” according to the World Health Organization.
The name “Pasteur” evokes a very different form of power: scientific authority grounded in the germ theory revolution led by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 19th century. What began in Paris as the Institut Pasteur in 1888 evolved into a global network of Pasteur Institutes stretching from North and West Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America. Many of these institutes were established by the colonial power in contexts shaped by empire, trade, war, and epidemic disease. Their founding logic was often blunt: Infectious disease undermined economic productivity, military capacity, and imperial stability. Public health, in other words, was never separate from geopolitics. Over time, Pasteur Institutes were set up in places such as Dakar, Senegal; Tunis, Tunisia; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, often in response to local disease burdens and the need for vaccine production capacity.
