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.
The Pasteur Institute of Iran was established in 1920 through a collaboration between the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Iranian government. It is a leading medical research center in Iran with more than 1,300 employees working on vaccine development, biopharmaceutical production, and diagnostic kit manufacturing. It also operates National Reference Laboratories to manage infectious diseases in Iran and neighboring countries and offers advanced Ph.D. programs and educational initiatives in fields such as medical biotechnology, microbiology, and systems biology.
These institutes became nodal points for microbiology, epidemiology, and vaccine research. They trained scientists, produced diagnostics, and built surveillance systems long before “global health security” became a policy buzzword.
Their institutional design is instructive. Unlike purely national laboratories, Pasteur Institutes have historically operated as part of a network, sharing protocols, research findings, and training exchanges. This distributed model of science allowed for both local adaptation and global coordination. It embedded knowledge production within regional contexts while maintaining international linkages. Depending on their status, their funding comes from different sources, including public funding from France, local governments, private donors, NGOs, and revenues from health services.
The welfare implications have been profound. Vaccines against rabies, yellow fever, and other infectious diseases produced within these networks reduced mortality, stabilized labor markets, and improved life expectancy. In economic terms, they generated positive externalities on a vast scale: healthier populations, lower health care costs, and enhanced productivity. The social rate of return on such investments likely far exceeded their fiscal costs.
Conflict has repeatedly shaped the trajectory of Pasteur Institutes. Wars create the conditions for epidemics: troop movements, refugee flows, supply chain breakdowns, and overcrowded urban environments. They also create urgency. States facing biological threats often accelerate funding for laboratories, epidemiological training, and vaccine research.
War can also disrupt scientific collaboration, damage infrastructure, and isolate research communities. The recent reporting on explosions near Pasteur Street is a reminder that public health institutions are not insulated from geopolitical tensions. When laboratories operate within politically charged urban spaces, they are embedded in the same vulnerabilities as the rest of the city.
This tension is not unique to Iran. Throughout the 20th century, research institutes in Europe, Asia, and Africa have navigated regime change, sanctions, and armed conflict. Their survival often depended on maintaining scientific credibility and demonstrating tangible benefits to local populations.
From a welfare economics perspective, the Pasteur model illustrates the importance of state-supported knowledge institutions in correcting market failures. Infectious disease control is a classic public good: non-excludable and non-rivalrous in its benefits. Private markets underinvest in epidemic preparedness because returns are uncertain and often realized collectively rather than individually.
Pasteur Institutes therefore function as quasi-public goods providers. They internalize externalities by generating vaccines, diagnostics, and surveillance systems that benefit entire populations. Over time, they have contributed to dramatic reductions in child mortality and gains in life expectancy across regions where they operate.
Moreover, these institutes help reduce global inequality. By locating advanced scientific capacity in low- and middle-income countries, the Pasteur network decentralized expertise that would otherwise have remained concentrated in high-income nations. This diffusion of knowledge has long-run welfare implications: it strengthens domestic health systems, builds human capital, and reduces dependency on imports during crises.
The current geopolitical climate is characterized by fragmentation, sanctions regimes, and strategic rivalry. In such an environment, the future of global scientific networks is uncertain. The Pasteur Institutes offer a model worth revisiting: distributed, collaborative, mission-oriented, and embedded within local contexts.
Three lessons likely stand out. First, scientific infrastructure is cumulative. The laboratories built today shape resilience decades hence. Underinvestment during peacetime becomes painfully visible during crises.
Second, global health networks are strategic assets. Their value lies not only in disease control but in trust, data sharing, and collective problem-solving.
Third, welfare gains from public health institutions extend far beyond mortality reduction. They stabilize economies, enhance educational attainment, and underpin long-term development.
Images of explosions near Pasteur Street may dominate headlines today. Yet the deeper story is institutional longevity and scientific optimism in an era of war gloom and doom. For more than a century, Pasteur Institutes around the world have navigated war, decolonization, economic upheaval, and pandemic shocks. They have endured because microbes do not respect political cycles, and societies ultimately recognize that public health is foundational to prosperity.
If there is a hook in the events unfolding in Tehran, it is this: War may command attention, but welfare is built in laboratories. The global history of Pasteur Institutes demonstrates that investments in science, when sustained across political regimes and geopolitical tensions, generate some of the highest social returns imaginable. In a fractured world, preserving and strengthening such networks is not merely a technical choice. It is an economic and moral imperative.
Chirantan Chatterjee is a professor of economic development, innovation, and global health economy at the University of Sussex and an invited visiting professor at EMLYON Business School’s HITS Institute. Guy Vernet is the former director Centre Pasteur du Cameroun and Institut Pasteur de Bangui.
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