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The Chinese used fermented soybean curd to treat skin infections 3,000 years ago. They started using fermented tea to treat a variety of illnesses as early as 220 B.C.
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Schwann concluded that fermintaion is the result of living things.
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The French chemist Louis Pasteur determined that fermentaion is caused by yeast. He was in fluenced bt the earlier work of Theodor Schwann(a German scientist who helped develop the cell theory).
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Eduard Buchner received the Nobel prize for showing that enzymes in yeast cells, not the yeast cells themselves, cause fermintation.
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Arthur Harden and Hans Euler-Chelpin determined exactly how enzymes cause fermentation. They won the Nobel prize for their work in 1929.
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Technology was developed to use fermentation to produce antibiotics.
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Today fermentation is used to produce industrial chemicals, medicines such as antibiotics, and alcoholic beverages. It is als used to make bread rise and preserve many types of food.
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The use of fermentation to make bread rise and to produce alcoholic beverages is as old as the develpment of agriculture itself. Most scholors date this use of fermentation all the way back to 8000 B.C.