in 1620, the physician and early chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont published this recipe for making mice:
- "for if you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat
together with some wheat in an open mouth jar, after about 21 days the
odor changes and the ferment coming out of the underwear and penetrating
through the husks of the wheat, changes the wheat into mice. But what
is more remarkable is that mice of both sexes emerge (from the wheat)
and these mice successfully reproduce with mice born naturally from
parents? But what is even more remarkable is that the mice which came
out were not small mice? but fully grown."
...the theory of spontaneous generation was finally dispelled
following experiments done by Louis Pasteur in 1862 for which he won
Alhumbert prize
(another interesting story).
- “I shall demonstrate that there was one source of error that M. Pouchet
did not notice, that never occurred to him, that had never occurred to
anyone before him, and that this source of error makes his experiment
completely useless, and as bad as that of Van Helmont’s pot of dirty
linen. I shall show you where the mice came in. I shall demonstrate that
in every experiment of the kind that concerns us here, one must
absolutely rule out the use of the mercury trough.”
