Traditional
religion attributed the origin of life to the supernatural power who
created the whole natural world. But Spontaneous Generation was the
first naturalistic theory of life arising from non-life; which goes
back to Aristotle and continued until the 19
th century by
which many people believed in the regular spontaneous generation of
complex, living organisms that are generated by decaying organic
substances like mice might spontaneously appear in the stored grains
or maggots could spontaneously appear in meat and so on. It is a
rough idea of heterogenesis theory which explains that some forms of
life could arise from different forms. That was briefly explained in
1962, a modern scientist John Desmond Bernal said that the basic idea
of such theories was that life was continuously created as a result
of chance events.
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| Girolamo Fracastaoro |
In
1546, an Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastaoro theorized that epidermic
diseases were caused by tiny, invisible particles or “spores”,
which might not be living creatures, but this was not widely
accepted.
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| Robert Hooke |
In 1665, an English philosopher, Robert Hooke published the first drawings of a
microorganism and later followed by a Dutch scientist, Anthony Van
Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganism that were probably protozoa and
bacteria in 1676.
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| Francesco Redi |
But in 1668, an Italian physician, Francesco Redi showed that no maggots
appeared in meat when flies were prevented from laying eggs which led
to prove that spontaneous generation was false.
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| Lazzaro Spallanzani |
But this couldn't
disprove this spontaneous generation theory while as in 1768, Lazzaro
Spallanzani, an Italian biologist, demonstrated that microbes were
present in the air and could be killed by boiling.
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| Louis Paster |
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| Flask used for |
In 1861, a French
biologist, Louis Paster disproving by performing a series of
experiments which demonstrated that organisms such as bacteria and
fungi do not spontaneously appear in sterile, nutrient-rich media
without the help of spores, but could only appear by invasion from
without. This experiment supported the cell theory.
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