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Anaximander was the first person to suggest spontaneous generation
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After Anaximander, Aristotle claimed that simple bodies and organisms could spontaneously generate
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In 1668, Francisco Redi demonstrated that maggots were not created spontaneously, but from eggs that adult flies laid.
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John Needham was an English biologist and Roman Catholic priest, who hypothesized spontaneous generation by countering another scientist, Louis Joblot's experiment that infusoria was spontaneously generated.
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Lazzaro Spallanzani modified the Needham experiment. He hypothesized that in Needham's experiment, one of the containers that he used was contaminated, which was the reason for a successfully proven hypothesis.
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Félix Archimède Pouchet began presenting a series of papers in 1855 to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, trying to prove spontaneous generation, and to show not only that it happened, but under what kind of circumstances it occured.
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Louis Pasteur objected to the idea of spontaneous generation, and to Pouchet's research on the idea.
