THE WORK OF PASTEUR 37 



We even find an attempt to rehabilitate Pouchet's experi- 

 ments and thus to resuscitate the theory of spontaneous 

 generation in the much pubHcised book of O. Lepeshinskaya, 

 The development of cells jwm living matter.^^ How- 

 ever, no such attempts have withstood criticism by experi- 

 ment and, as Terekhovskii pointed out long ago, they are 

 foredoomed to failure. The organisation of any of the living 

 creatures known to us, even the simplest ones, exhibits not 

 only a very complicated structure in the protoplasm, a par- 

 ticular arrangement in space of those molecular complexes 

 which constitute the protoplasm, but also organisation in 

 time, a particular series of biochemical processes which, 

 together, constitute the metabolism. We now know very 

 well that even relatively slight interference can produce far- 

 reaching changes in such a system. On damaging protoplasm 

 mechanically or by heat the balance of the metabolism is 

 disturbed irreversibly. This disturbance upsets the har- 

 monious interaction of the synthetic processes and markedly 

 intensifies the reactions of breakdown which proceed in a 

 disorderly way. 



It is interesting to note that the hypothesis of spontaneous 

 generation was always applied to those organisms which had 

 only been studied imperfectly at each stage of the develop- 

 ment of science. Before Redi's experiments it was applied to 

 various kinds of worms and parasites. It was the same with 

 bacteria before the time of Pasteur. Finally, in our own 

 times, an attempt has been made to resurrect the theory of 

 spontaneous generation with reference to organisms dis- 

 covered during this period but still poorly understood, the 

 ultramicrobes and filterable viruses. However, this attempt 

 has been a complete fiasco too. 



Summing up all that has been said in this chapter, one 

 must emphasise that the very idea of spontaneous generation 

 has been based on faulty observations, accepted uncritically, 

 of the sudden appearance of living creatures in nature or in 

 the laboratory. The possibility of spontaneous generation was 

 assumed by philosophers of every school and persuasion 

 throughout the course of many centuries. They only quar- 

 relled about the theoretical interpretation of the ' pheno- 

 menon '. However, as the methods of scientific investigation 



