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400 BCE
Aristotle
He was one of the first people to believe in spontaneous generation. He posted a book around 350 B.C. which aims to explain the seemingly sudden emergence of organisms. -
Jean Baptiste Van Helmont
The first experiment to prove the spontaneous generation theory was made by Jean Baptiste Van Helmont, he proclaimed he had made a unique experiment he placed a dirty shirt together with some wheat and according to him, mice were born 21 days later. -
Francesco Redi
Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist he designed a scientific experiment to test the spontaneous creation of maggots by placing fresh meat in each of two different jars (one jar without the cover, the second with cloth, and one with a tape).
Redi successfully demonstrated that the maggots came from fly eggs and thereby helped to disprove spontaneous generation. -
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used single-lens microscopes, which he made, to make the first observations of bacteria and protozoa. He used his finding to prove how cells and bacteria generate themselves and don’t come from random non-living things.