Sparks of Life

The spontaneous generation controversy of the 1860s and 1870s is often presented as one of the great experimental controversies in the history of science. [End Page 799] That the names of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall have conspicuous display in the scientific hall of fame, while their principal opponents Felix Pouchet and Henry Charlton Bastian, if known at all, are known as feeble experimenters at best, or at worst as willful proponents of error, is due in part to the outcome of that controversy: the rejection of so-called spontaneous generation. Many accounts presume the outcome and take their task as following the demonstration of the true. Even if living things sometimes did pop up in solutions long boiled in sealed flasks, surely their presence represented contamination by some extrahardy form of microbial commando; that such entities--heat-resistant spores--had yet to be isolated was no major obstacle: one could infer their presence as necessary to the effect. But one could equally plausibly hold that sterilization had really been achieved and that the emergent life was truly new, a product of heterogenesis (life from nonliving organic matter) or archeobiosis (life from inorganic matter). The controversy could not be settled by experiment alone; it depended also on what it meant for an experiment to "work": one might as well say that lack of growth showed an experimenter's failure to produce a difficult effect as that presence of growth showed sloppy technique and contamination

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