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Francesco Redi
Francesco Redi was a Tuscan naturalist, physician and poet,recognized for his experiments in Florence, which were considered very important in refuting the theory of spontaneous generation, which postulated the production of living things from inert matter. -
Redi’s experiment
Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, did a scientific experiment to test the spontaneous creation of maggots by placing fresh meat in each of two different jars. Finnaly, Redi successfully demonstrated that the maggots came from fly eggs and helped to disprove spontaneous generation. -
John Needham
John Needham was an english scientist and Catholic priest, defender of the theory of spontaneous generation. Needham carried out numerous experiments in which he prepared meat and vegetable broths. Needham concluded that the microorganisms must have developed from the broths. -
Needham’s rebutta
In 1745, John Needham (1713–1781) published a report of his own experiments, in which he briefly boiled broth infused with plant or animal matter, to kill all preexisting microbes. He then sealed the flasks. This suggested that microbes were introduced into these flasks from the air. -
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was a French microbiologist and chemist. He was known to the general public for his demonstration of the germ theory of a disease and its development and inoculation techniques. -
Pasteur puts spontaneous generation to rest
Louis Pasteur designed a procedure to test whether sterile nutrient broth could spontaneously generate microbial life. To do this, he set up two experiments. In both, Pasteur added nutrient broth to flasks, bent the necks of the flasks into S shapes, and then boiled the broth to kill any existing microbes.