ORIGIN OF MICROORGANISMS AND THE

CONTROVERSIES
From earliest times, people had believed in spontaneous
generation-that living organisms could develop from nonliving
matter. The hypothesis that living organisms arise from nonliving
matter is called spontaneous generation or Abiogenesis. According
to spontaneous generation, a “vital force’ forms life. The
Alternative hypothesis, that the living organisms arise from
preexisting life, is called biogenesis.
FRANCESCO REDI
Italian physician Francesco Redi developed an experiment that demonstrated that an
organism did not spontaneously appear. He filled jars with rotting meat. Some jars he
sealed and others he left opened. Those that were open eventually contained maggots,
which is the larval stage of the fly. The other jars did not contain maggots because flies
could not enter the jar to lay eggs on the rotting meat. His critics stated that air was the
ingredient required for spontaneous generation of an organism. Air was absent from the
sealed jar and therefore no spontaneous generation could occur, they said (Fig. 1-5). Redi
repeated the experiment except this time he placed a screen over the opened jars. This
prevented flies from entering the jar. There weren’t any maggots on the rotting meat. Until
that time scientists did not have a clue about how to fight disease. However, Redi’s
discovery gave scientists an idea. They used Redi’s findings to conclude that killing the
microorganism that caused a disease could prevent the disease from occurring. A new
microorganism could only be generated by the reproduction of another microorganism. Kill
the microorganism and you won’t have new microorganisms, the theory went—you could
stop the spread of the disease. Scientists called this the Theory of Biogenesis. The Theory
of Biogenesis states that a living cell is generated from another living cell.
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Georg Friedrich Schroder (1810-1885) and Theodor von Dusch (1824-1890) allowed air to
enter a flask of heat-sterilized medium after it had passed through sterile cotton wool. No
growth occurred in the medium even though the air had not been heated. Despite these
experiments, the French naturalist Felix Pouchet (1800-1872) claimed in 1859 to have
carried out experiments conclusively proving that microbial growth could occur without
air contamination.
 Louis Pasteur’s experiment
Pouchet's claim provoked Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) to settle the matter of
spontaneous generation. Pasteur first filtered air through cotton and found
that objects resembling plant spores had been trapped. If a piece of the
cotton was placed in sterile medium after air had been filtered through it,
microbial growth occurred. Next he placed nutrient solutions in flasks, heated
their necks in a flame, and drew them out into a variety of curves. The swan-
neck flasks that he produced in this way had necks open to the atmosphere.
Pasteur then boiled the solutions for a few minutes and allowed them to cool.
No growth took place even though the contents of the flasks were exposed to
the air. Pasteur pointed out that growth did not occur because dust and germs
had been trapped on the walls of the curved necks. If the necks were broken,
growth commenced immediately. Pasteur had not only resolved
the controversy by 1861 but also had shown how to keep solutions sterile.