Describe Pasteur's experiment that disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. Support your description with suitable diagrams.

Describe Pasteur's experiment that disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. Support your description with suitable diagrams.

If we look around in our everyday environment, we observe that straw, soil, mud, dirt, indeed any kind of garbage or rotting matter is infested with a large number of different kinds of living organisms. Such observations led people to believe that life originated spontaneously from non-living matter. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), known as the father of biology, maintained that not only worms and insects, but also fish, frogs and mice could spring from suitable breeding materials like filth and moist soil.

This theory of spontaneous generation was disproved by the experiments of the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur in 1862. Pasteur performed his experiment before a gathering of biologists to test his hypothesis, that only "life begets life".

For his experiment, Pasteur took two flasks, half-filled them with yeast infusion containing a little bit of sugar and heated them so as to kill any living organisms. He sealed the mouth of one of the flasks and left the other open to the air. After a few days, he invited His friends to observe what had happened. To their surprise, they found that the closed flask was still free of any living organism while the open one was infested with living organisms. In fact, one of this sealed flask is still kept at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Even after more than a hundred years, there are no living organisms in it.  Pasteur had, thus, shown by these simple experiments that living organisms do not arise spontaneously.