Reexamining several episodes reveals the complexity and human richness of science in the makina

pontaneous generation, the question of whether life can originate from nonliving materials, was an important issue during the early development of microbiology. Recently, historians have added new details about several key episodes in the spontaneous generation debate. By attempting to understand these episodes in their appropriate historical contexts, we can better appreciate how this branch of science developed. Moreover, this reexamination illustrates how the making of scientific knowledge can be fraught with misunderstandings because of differing assumptions or when the use of incommensurate apparatus led those working in the same field to talk past one another. History of science, when done well, reveals a realistic, complex, rich picture with which to educate new practitioners, one that does not create heros to whom we can never measure up and villains who never existed. Furthermore, showing how science is integrated into its larger cultural context avoids the stultifying compartmentalization of knowledge that so often occurs and gives a much fuller appreciation of how science developed from philosophy and has come to have a unique character. Galileo, is an important figure in the early spontaneous generation debates. From experiments in 1668, Redi showed that maggots come from fly eggs, not from rotting meat. The appearance of maggots in rotting meat had previously been widely attributed to spontaneous generation. In his experiments, Redi placed samples of many different types of meat and fish in glass jars, with one set of jars open to the air and the other set covered with fine muslin cloth. While maggots never appeared in the meat of the covered jars, flies crawled about on the cloth and sometimes laid eggs there. Those eggs hatched into maggots, disproving spontaneous generation as their origin. Louis Pasteur, T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s famous