The supposed production of living organisms from nonliving matter, as inferred from the apparent appearance of life in some supposedly sterile environments.
In 1668, Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, designed a scientific experiment to test the spontaneous creation of maggots by placing fresh meat in each of two different jars. One jar was left open; the other was covered with a cloth. Days later, the open jar contained maggots, whereas the covered jar contained no maggots. He did note that maggots were found on the exterior surface of the cloth that covered the jar. Redi successfully demonstrated that the maggots came from fly eggs and thereby helped to disprove spontaneous generation.
louis pasteur designed an experiment to test whether sterile nutrient broth could spontaneously generate microbial life. To do this, he set up an pasteur experiment . In both, pasteur added nutrient broth to flasks, bent the necks of the flasks into S shapes, and then boiled the broth to kill any existing microbes.