Microorganisms and the Origin of Life

Belief in spontaneous generation lived on for years, as it had for centuries. For example, an elderly lady of the writer s early acquaintance complained bitterly that she had been cheated by a merchant who sold her a woolen coat which was of such a quality that it turned entirely into moths when left undisturbed in a closed for some months  

In the earlier years, in the absence of exact knowledge of microorganisms or chemistry, there had arisen much skepticism and bitter feeling over the question of the origin of life. One scientist who still held to the ancient ideas says of the views of another who doubted, 

So may we doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated, or if beetles and wasps in cow dung, or if butterflies, locusts, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied matter which is to receive the forms of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed. To question this is to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go to Egypt and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants. 

There Was a great deal of such acrid discussion by wordy savants of the times, who tried to settle everything by argument. Experimentation was regarded as rather undignified and even smacking of relations with the devil. 

John Needham (1713-1781). Similar experiments carried out by an English scientist, John Needham, gave conflicting results. Life developed in Needham s heated closed vessels as well as in the open unheated ones. He therefore believed in spontaneous generation. We shall see later that this result was due to insufficient heating which failed to kill heat-resistant forms of bacteria called spores. But nothing was known about spores at that time. 

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