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Francesco Redi
Italian physician, naturalist, biologist, and poet Francesco Redi made significant contributions to science. He is recognized for having been the first to question the commonly held notion of spontaneous generation. Redi was able to do this by conducting studies that demonstrated that maggots, which were previously believed to arise spontaneously, actually come from fly eggs. -
Francesco Redi's Experiment
He used four jars and put pork portions in each one. The other half of the jars were tightly sealed, with only half of them left open. Surprisingly, flies were only drawn to the open jars.
Redi came up with a theory, claiming that flies were to blame for depositing eggs on the rotting meat, which then hatched into maggots. His experiment looked at whether life may spontaneously develop from inanimate substances in order to test the theory of spontaneous generation. -
John Needham
Roman Catholic priest and famous English biologist John Needham made important contributions to science. He conducted a number of studies that seemed to back up the well-known idea of spontaneous generation. -
Lazzaro Spallanzini
Lazzaro Spallanzani was an Italian Catholic priest who also studied biology and physiology. He made significant advancements in the fields of animal reproduction and echolocation. He was able to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation, which asserted that living things may spontaneously develop from non-living elements, through a series of tests. -
Needham's experiment
First, he brought the soup to a boil, rendering any bacteria present inert. Then, when the broth had cooled, he transferred it to flasks and sealed them. Needham noticed the existence of living things moving inside the sealed flasks after some time had passed. The notion of spontaneous genesis appeared to be supported by this discovery. -
Spallanzini repeats Needham's experiment
In order to refute Needham's conclusions, Spallanzani repeated the experiment. He used a similar process in his iteration but added a further step. Spallanzani put the flasks containing the cooled broth under various conditions, such as prolonged heating and longer lengths of time, after closing them. He looked into the flasks, but saw no indication of life. He came to the conclusion that the bacteria came from contaminated air. -
Louis Pasteur
Famous French scientist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur is recognized for his ground-breaking work in a number of domains. His innovations and discoveries included fundamental ideas including immunization, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, which bears his name. -
Pasteur's experiment
In an attempt to verify the notion of spontaneous generation, Louis Pasteur carried out a condensed experiment. He used two sets of sterile nutritional broth-filled flasks. The flasks had broken necks in one pair, but their curved necks were whole in the second set. Pasteur noticed that only the broken-neck flasks turned hazy, indicating the proliferation of germs, after boiling the soup to kill any existing microbes.