It was the work of Louis Pasteur that went furthest to resolve the question of
spontaneous generation. He was the
son of a tanner in Dole in the foothills of the
Oddly enough, he was not concerned
directly 
with
spontaneous generation - his main interest was in the process of fermentation.
Later he went on to study bacteria, and to devise the method of
preventing milk and other liquids from going sour which we call pasteurisation
in his honour.
Yeast
By 1861, when Pasteur was 29 years old, he had
already proved that a living organism (yeast) was responsible for producing
alcohol and had shown manufacturers that when this failed to happen it was due
to contamination with lactic acid producing bacteria.
This raised the question of where these organisms had come from.
He wrote confidently to his friend, Chappuis, about his studies on fermentation, “… connected as they are with the impenetrable mystery of Life and Death … I am hoping to make a decisive step very soon by solving, without the least confusion, the celebrated question of spontaneous generation.” So Pasteur’s work on spontaneous generation was, as he wrote later, “a digression made necessary by my studies on fermentation”.
It was at the start of his work on spontaneous
generation that Pasteur suffered the first of a series of tragedies that were to
deeply affect his personal life. His
nine-year-old daughter Jeanne had been staying in the Arbois with her
grandfather. There had been an
outbreak of typhoid fever in the district and the small girl had been one of its
victims. “I cannot keep my thoughts from my poor
little girl,” Pasteur wrote to his father three months after she
died.
Click
on the clever yeast cell to find out about the battle between Pasteur and the
supporters of spontaneous generation.
Bibliography:
Roy
Porter The Greatest Benefit to Mankind,
Harper Collins 1997
Robert Reid, Microbes
and Men, BBC 1974